“Sports injuries”

To this day, my mom still revels in the glory of the results of a trip to the doctors office: To understand the humor of it you have to understand that my mom hasn’t done anything athletic since she was a school girl and she’d run home each afternoon—not for exercise, but because she didn’t want to miss her favorite TV program. So what made that trip to the doctor’s office so memorable is that he told her she had a “sports injury’. We kids always give Mom a hard time for being so un-athletic, and she uses that story as a counter argument. To make the story even more ironic, I think the original reason she scheduled the appointment was because she had sprained her thumb pretty severely when trying to break the ears off of a solid chocolate bunny.

In Mom’s defense (and to keep me on her good side in light of the upcoming gift giving season—remember, my birthday is just after Christmas) I’ll throw in these two disclaimers: currently, she DOES put in some time each week on the exercise bike, and there IS a SLIGHT chance that I’ve jumbled the preceding stories… none of them are untrue, but its possible that the sprained thumb and the “sports injury” diagnosis were on separate occasions, but in the interest of readability, I’ll continue with the presumption that they happened simultaneously.

I tell that story to emphasize the fact that unusual “sports injuries” aren’t uncommon in my family, and for some unfortunate reason, they’ve seemed even LESS uncommon in my life during the past few months:

Back in September I was coaching a 14-to-15-year-olds’ football team. We had an odd number of players, so during a lot of the drills I’d jump in to even up the sides. I suffered a lot of fat lips, tongue bites, and shots to the temples (they were wearing full gear and I wore none). Well, on one particular day we were doing some relay races for conditioning, and again I was needed to even up the odds. One of the legs of the relay was for the entire team to leap-frog one another for 30 yards, then turn around and come back.

I’ll emphasize again that the players were in pads and I was not. Our team was in the lead. We hurried down, about faced and hurried back. Then, when my turn came on the final stretch, I leaped over Sommerville, Darrow, Williams… but when I got to Corlett… that’s when fate turned against me. Just as I spread my legs to leap over the crouched Corlett, he suddenly looked up to gauge the distance to the finish line, but doing so brought his helmeted head squarely and solidly between the spread of my legs and into my fully exposed family jewels.

Mid-flight, I curled up in pain and collapsed on the ground in front of Corlett in the fetal position. The other players continued leap frogging and our team ended up winning the race… but I had lost the war. I was down for the count and when I mustered the strength to look around, I noticed that everyone else was rolling on the ground too, only they where holding their sides in laughter as I was holding my crotch in pain.

I NEVER go to the doctor, but the pain of that racking was so legendarily powerful that I scheduled an appointment just to make sure that the hardware wasn’t damaged. The doctor just laughed at me and said he could tell that it hurt and he reassuringly joked that someday my children will enjoy hearing me tell that story.

Well, just this week I suffered another unexpected, and yet no-less-embarrassing “sports injury”:

I like to run for exercise, and I usually jog 2-3 miles per day, but last week I decided to add some mileage in an effort to drop some weight. So now I’m jogging 4-5 miles per day. During the summer I like to jog on the high school track or on the riverside trail near my apartment, but Utah get’s too cold for my taste after about mid-October, so for the past month or so I’ve been staying indoors doing my running on a treadmill.

Some people hate running on a treadmill, but I find that if I put on Jeopardy I pay more attention to the trivia questions than to how exhausted or how bored I might feel, so I kind of enjoy it. The only draw back to being indoors is that I usually sweat a little more than I do when I run outdoors. Usually the extra sweating is no big deal, but when I doubled my distance it seemed like my body’s sweat production tripled.

Usually, when I’m done jogging I’ve got a handsome 4-inch aura of sweat around my collar, but longer workout resulted in my entire shirt being DRENCHED. In all my life I’ve only ever seen one other person ever soak their shirt with their own sweat and that was the 300 pound kid that played basketball for Meeker Junior High (ugh, I can still remember how second-hand slimy I got when I had to post up against him).

Well, a funny thing happens when your shirt gets that wet: it becomes heavier. And when you combine the extra weight and moisture of a wet t-shirt with the rhythmic sway of one’s jogging gate, the result is increased friction against one’s chest.

I don’t even know why god gave men nipples. We don’t use them. Until last week, I never really minded having them, but after five miles worth of a heavy wet t-shirt grinding away at them, I was introduced to a pain so exquisite and so unique that I found myself cursing the heavens for ever giving me those confounded contraptions. After all, he didn’t give me birthing hips or mammary glands, so why burden me with two superfluous nickel-sized relics of evolution? Luckily, only might side was “injured”.

I tried several remedies. The first night I stuck a glob of Neosporin on there and just let it soak in the healing, but when I got dressed the next morning I realized that the darn things must be non-absorbant. Before my next workout I stuck a circular bandage over it, but that didn’t work for two reasons: 1.) when I looked at myself in the mirror the band-aid made it look like my chest was winking at me, and 2.) a few minutes into the jog, once I started sweating, the adhesive came unstuck and the protection was gone.

My last and most desparate attempt requires some explanation. I started watching season one of MacGyver on DVD, and well, you know how crafty and resourceful he is. Plus, just the day before I cut my finger with a knife and used krazy glue to close up the cut. Well, I decided that the same thing ought to work for other “injuries”. So, I put krazy glue on the “effected area”. In theory it should have worked—because have you ever got krazy glue on your finger? You can’t feel a thing. Well, it didn’t quite work. Now it’s just sore and crusty. I think krazy glue has silicone in it, so I guess you can say that I gave myself a do-it-yourself boob job.

I don’t think there’s any quick fix to the problem, so I’ll just have to wait out the healing process and then if I’m going to go for a long sweaty run in the future I think I’ll just have to wear a snug wife beater tank top underneath. I hate resorting to that, especially since just this Tuesday I made fun of a friend for wearing those. But I don’t see any way around it, because as useless as those things are, I just don’t think it’d look quite right if I had them surgically removed.

Losing loved ones

First off, let me say that there’s nothing sadder than when someone close to you dies, and if someone stumbles across this post during a time when they’re trying to cope with the feelings that follow the death of a friend or family member, my condolences go out to you. The rest of this post is NOT about people dying, so I apologize if the title was misleading.

“Lois, someday…”
“Clark, don’t tell me that someday I’ll meet someone!
You’re a pretty tough act to follow, you know?”

Although I didn’t lose a relative, my recent loss DOES feel like a death in the family: in the past week, I’ve lost TWO of my very favorite shirts. I know that I’m supposed to tell myself that they’re just shirts and that there are other shirts out there that I’ll find some day that I’ll love just as much, but these weren’t just any old shirts, these had been a significant part of my life for the past four years.

They say that the clothes make the man. Assuming that’s true, then it should be obvious why I feel so devastated. These were the shirts I could count on when I needed to know I looked good. These were the shirts I wanted to wear every day, but on weekends when I had dates, I’d save them for the weekend. These were the shirts that went with everything for any occasion.

“Seems to me, that button is in the worst possible spot.

The second button literally makes or brakes the shirt, look at it: it's too high!

It's in no-man's-land, you look like you live with your mother.”

Probably the saddest part is that now I’m stuck wearing shirts that my mom bought me (not that there’s anything wrong with that). They’re fine shirts and I really do like the patterns, but the buttons just aren’t properly spaced. I can either wear the second button buttoned (which makes it look like the shirt is choking me) or unbuttoned (which feels just way too David Hasselhoff for me).

But geez! Those old favorite shirts of mine had their buttons in JUST the right places. I don’t know what I’m going to do without them! Plus, one of them had snaps instead of buttons, which is so cool because when you’re taking it off you can tear it open like Superman. I’m really going to miss those old friends of mine.

My dad had a birthday last week: I sent him the exact same pair of slippers that he already had (but his were getting worn out) and he called to tell me how perfect the present was. We got to talking and it sounds like he’s just the same as me: when I find something that I like I want to keep it forever and if it needs replacing I want to replace it with the very same thing. These shirts are so old that I don’t think they even make that sort of material anymore, but I’m willing to look for a while just to be sure.

“Wait. Why is Obi-Wan wearing by bathrobe?
…I see you got barbeque sauce on my bathrobe.”
“You have done that yourself!”
“I think I’d remember. I’m very neat. We both know I don’t eat barbeque.
I ABSOLUTELY don’t eat barbeque!”
“Only a SITH deals in absolutes.”

Of coarse, it might be best just to let it go. I once had a Nordstrom tie that I loved, but I lost it in a move. I went to about 6 different Nordstroms looking for the same tie and couldn’t find it anywhere, until I found the very same tie on eBay, so I bought it right away—the listing claimed that it was like new. Well, I was so excited to get it that I wore it to church the Sunday after it arrived. But during a boring part of Sunday School (which isn’t a rarity by any means) I was admiring my resurrected favorite tie only to discover that there were lots of tiny barbeque stains on it… “like new” my eye! I haven’t worn it since.

“Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force.

Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not.

Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed, that is.”
“What must I do, Master Yoda?”
Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.”

I think it probably is best to just let them go. One of the shirts was ruined by a tear in the elbow and I’m toying with the idea of cutting and hemming it to make it into a short sleeve shrit, but chances are that it would look dumb and my infatuation with the shirt would blind me to how stupid it looked—and looking stupid in a favorite shirt defeats half of the purpose for a shirt being a favorite.

I can only hope that this holiday season brings the good fortune of introducing a new favorite shirt into my wardrobe. So, if anyone’s looking for gift ideas for a certain me… a button down shirt is at the top of my list… one with all the buttons in all the right places and colors that go with everything (I saved swatches from both of my defunct favorites if you’d like a reference).