I was out of town this weekend -- visiting the in-laws. As such, I didn't have a chance to put up an entry this weekend, and it's 10:30 and I've been driving all day, so I'm not going to put up until next week. I know my three regular readers will be disappointed, but I'll be back next week.
Oh, I will say one thing. On the way home I saw a Chick-Fil-A and was absolutely disgusted. I mean, I just hate their food, why is something else going on?
Oh, and one more thing -- a link to a women's MMA fight. I know one of the fighters (Barb "Little Warrior" Honchak). I went to college with her and her boyfriend (now husband) who you can catch a glimpse of during the fight as her corner man. I haven't talked either of them in quite some time, but we used to be part of the same little crew back in the day in B'ham. Apparently she's getting to be pretty damn good. I think this was a big time fight in women's MMA. At least it's the same referee from the huge UFC cards.
[Great song from my childhood. The Vanilla Ice lookalike in this video is played by Henry Rollins. I like at the end how they jump him and beat him. Pretty harsh, no? I mean you might not like his music and all, but physical assault? Also, it's sorta funny that a song about being original and not stealing people's ideas or going pop uses the same hook as Peter Gabriel's pop classic "Sledgehammer".]
I injured my hamstring Tuesday night, pretty severely. I'm pretty sure it's a grade two strain, although the specialist I saw didn't call it this. He didn't really call it anything, come to think of it, but he did tell me a little bit about the injury and what to do to rehab it. He also gave me some pain / anti-inflammatory medication -- prescription-strength Advil, essentially, nothing too strong.
I hurt it running from first to second in a softball game. There was a play at second, not even a particularly, close one, I was clearly going to be out, but I accelerated a bit at the end to try to beat the throw, and *POP* I felt my right hamstring go. I'm using the word "pop" to describe it because I don't have a better word, but it wasn't really a pop. It was a sudden, painful, unnatural event inside the back of my upper leg. It's a pretty common sports injury, and I instant knew what I'd done, and I thought to myself, "Well, there goes my season." It's a six to eight week recovery time, but I should make a full recovery, which is good.
It's kind of embarrassing to hurt myself in a beer-league softball game, but I was just running. It's not like I was taking the game too seriously -- diving for a ball in center or plowing into the catcher -- I was doing something that I've done hundreds of times before. Maybe I didn't warm up properly, but I tend to think it's just one of those fluke things that can happen, especially when you hit your mid-30s.
So now I'm laid up and it's an awful time to be laid up, because S is well into her seventh month of pregnancy, so she's basically laid up too. It's a chore for either of us to go up the stairs. Sleeping has also become a big issue; neither of us can get comfortable. I can't because my leg starts to throb, and S can't because she got a bowling ball for a tummy. We've started going the separate bed route, and thank God we can do that. This would be way worse if we still in a one bedroom apartment. I've heard it said that multiple TiVos and a bunch of square footage are the keys to a happy marriage. In our case it's multiple laptops, not TiVos, but the larger point is the same.
We're going to dinner and a movie tonight with some friends. Hopefully we can enjoy that and not be completely uncomfortable the entire time. We're seeing the Batman movie. It was our friend's choice. I mean, I don't having anything against it, but I'd be perfectly content to not see it as well. I've never been into comic books or anything like that, and I hate the fact that Hollywood has turned into a constant stream of sequels, retreads, and adaptations. Since the Jack Nicholson / Michael Keaton Batman came out in 1989, or whenever it was, there's been, what, five, six additional blockbuster Batmans? And I'm supposed to be excited about another one? It's like how Apple or whoever is always coming out with newer models of their products, and it's like, quit bothering me with all this new, new, new, when it's basically the same shit as before. When you get something genuinely new let me know.
[I never needed plastic molding to improve my physique... Pure West.]
Anyway, on very tangentially related subject, I've been reading a very good book, "Popular Crime", by Bill James. (The tangent is that the recent shooting in Colorado at the theater showing Batman reminded me of a crime the author would discuss in this book.) It's basically a history of the most popular crimes in America over the last 100 years or so. It's really terrific, though it's long, and it can be morbid. A book about rape and murder and kidnapping is morbid? Yes, hard to believe I know.
James's bit on the Kennedy Assassination I found particularly fascinating. His theory -- which isn't really his theory, per se, it came from some other fellow, James mostly just relays it and agrees with it -- is that the fatal bullet came not from Oswald, who was, in fact, the only premeditated gunman (and did hit Kennedy twice), but from secret service agent George Hickey, accidentally. It's not very plausible on it's face, but nothing is that plausible with the Kennedy assassination, there are things that don't add up (which is a big part of the reason for all the nutjob conspiracy theories). But when looking at the facts -- at least as they're relayed in "Popular Crime" -- you come to the conclusion that not only is Hickey accidentally shooting Kennedy the most plausible explanation, it's the only plausible explanation.
Well, that's all I got for this entry. Until next time...
S and I went to a birthing class this weekend -- three hours Friday night, three hours Saturday morning. This seems the appropriate amount of time to me. It was enough time to get an idea of what to expect and how to prepare, but not enough time for the participants to give long-winded, off-topic, personal anecdotes, or to turn the class into a commiseration session, both of which I've heard friends complain about with their birthing class. Plus, it was a relatively small group, only three other couples, and everybody was pretty cool (i.e., not annoying) so that was good.
I liked the teacher. She looked sorta like a slight, gay female version of Dr. Drew. She was really nice, and I liked her overall attitude toward pregnancy. She was into a lot of aspects of a "natural" pregnancy, but she definitely wasn't part of the no-medication-suffer-at-all-costs / hospitals-are-bad / doctors-are-evil crowd. We were originally signed up for a different class, and I got the feeling in reading the blurbs on their website, that they were much more in this camp. I didn't really want to go (it also was much longer, two hours a week every week for like eight weeks, and much more expensive), but I didn't want to be unsupportive, so I didn't protest (too much). Luckily, S mentioned the name of the place to her doctor during a checkup, and she didn't have nice things to say about it, so S canceled our spot.
It's a good thing, as I think S would have felt really out of place at a hardcore natural birth class. As it was, she was the odd duck in the class we did attend. At one point, the moms-to-be had to pick a "medication rating" with +10 being "I want to feel absolutely nothing", -10 being "I want no medication under any circumstances", and 0 being the cut off between wanting and not wanting epidural. S won't let me say what number she picked, but let's just say all the other women where somewhere around -6 and she wasn't. I don't think anybody was judging, but still.
[In birthing class, we watched this crazy video from the '70s of Brazilian women giving birth from the squatting position. It was very intriguing, but also very graphic, which is good. I need to be desensitized a little bit. Watching the bloody, gooey placenta come out after the baby is born is pretty gross. It's weird though. It seems so foreign watching the body expunge all this waste (the after matter is waste, not the baby, obviously), and yet if you think about, I do something similar everyday when I sit on the toilet, so why does it seem so strange?]
The thing is, I get why the natural birth movement exists (and I'm actually a product of it, I was born in a duplex very close to where I grew up and where my parents live today). For a long time a woman giving birth was told (by a male doctor) to do things that didn't make sense -- like lie on their back with their legs up in the air, so that gravity works against them -- or just given medication without any say in the matter. But things aren't like that anymore. They're not perfect, certainly, but they're better. Also, professional medical intervention is needed sometimes, and I don't get why it's often classified as "unnatural". If you look at the human race, what's our biggest (our only?) biological advantage over all other species. Our brains. We survive because we're smart. Modern medicine is an example of us humans using our unique biology to perpetuate our existence. What's more "natural" than this?
Take the C-section for example. One of the first things our teacher did was ask the couples if we wanted a C-section. We all said no, as you might expect. So she asked us why? We gave some reasons, scarring, it's unnecessary, surgery can stressful and scary, etc. These are all perfectly valid, but look at the flip side. C-sections are an almost completely complication-free way to deliver. There is almost a 100% chance with a C-section that you'll have a healthy baby and a healthy mom (after recovery). So how are they bad?
I think what's going on is that natural pregnancy has become a "cause" for a some people, and once something becomes a cause, it quickly leaves the realm of objectivity and fact. It gets back to my broader premise (laid it in this entry) that most people don't use rationality and logic as guiding principles in their decision making. It's faith, ideology, and ego, those are the big three.
Anyway, I feel like I'm getting away from the rough course I had laid out in my head for this entry, so I'm stopping here. Until next time...
It's currently 104,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit outside. OK, not literally. I'm exaggerating by a factor of 10^6, but it is pretty damn hot outside. It's hotter than Debbie Harry circa 1979.
And it's been like this for over a week now. That's the crazy, sucky thing. You basically have to live from air conditioned building to air conditioned building. Our home air conditioner isn't great either. I mean, it's fixed now, it works, but it doesn't really blast our house with cold air. It's not very efficient. My dad said we need to insulate our ducts, and I do plan on doing that (or rather paying somebody to do it, it's not like I can do it, myself), but I don't think that's the real problem. It's just not an efficient design. It's central air, but we only need it for a few rooms, so for instance, it's getting our basement, but our basement is already cool. Also, the main vent is in the living room -- which is good since that's the room we hang out in the most -- but it's on the only wall long enough to put a sofa, so our sofa blocks a lot of the air flow.
Still, I guess we should be happy that we have an air conditioner at all (and it's not like a week of above-100 degree weather is a normal occurrence), and that we never lost our power for longer than a few seconds last weekend. The derecho that came through here really wrought havoc on our area of DC, but somehow not on our neighborhood in particular. If you went just a few blocks in any direction the power was out, but it was on at our place. It was weird. Fortunate for us, but weird.
It would have been really awful to lose power too, because S is already in the too-big-to-be-comfortable-no-matter-what stage of her pregnancy, so sweltering heat is especially unwanted. And because my family (parents, sister, brother-in-law, two nephews) were all visiting, so I don't know what we would have done. We'd probably would have had to have a big slumber party in our basement. It's the only way we could have kept from melting.
We made the remarkably foolish-in-hindsight decision to go to the Lincoln Memorial last Friday when this heat wave just kicked in to full force (S didn't go, she had to work, and we aren't that foolish). It's over a mile walk from the closest metro station, so it's nearly three miles round trip. It was a sweaty, painful jaunt. I was wearing a baseball cap and whenever I saw a sprinkler, I'd take off my cap, soak it in the sprinkler, and put it back on. It felt super good, but only lasted a few minutes before it would be completely dry again. The sun was relentless. Plus, I did a lot of the trip with one of my nephews on my shoulders. The heat and the distance was too much for them.
It was too much for my mom too. She started feeling sick on the return walk and my dad took her back to the metro station (where it's always cool, because they have air conditioning and it's underground), and eventually back to my place, instead of to some museums with the rest of us. I was slightly worried. Not to sound morbid, but every summer you do hear stories about healthy seniors dropping dead in severe heat. Obviously, I don't think we were anywhere near this happening, but I'm sure that's what everybody thinks... until it happens.
Anyway, my little nephews (6 and 4) loved the American History and Natural History museums. We spent more time at the latter because there is more "cool" stuff to look at there. If the choice is between a display commemorating William McKinley and a display of a giant squid, which one do you think kids are choosing? They were particularly interested in a diorama of a caveman burial. I think this is because it was somewhat gruesome and intriguing and because you could see the dead caveman's naked butt. They are at that age where butts and poop and penises are funny. Oh wait, that's all ages.
[From a baby shower / house warming party while my family was in town.]
In other news, I've started watching too new TV shows. One is Louie which is pretty funny so far. It reminds me a lot of Curb Your Enthusiasm in that it's one man always getting into awkward situations, and in that it's hit-or-miss. Most the episodes are really funny, but sometimes a bit just doesn't work. But even when this happens I usually see what the intent was and get why it could be funny -- the execution just failed.
[By the way, the end of this clip makes no sense even in the context of the entire episode. One of the things about this show is that every now and then he just throws in some random, unrealistic, unexplainable event.]
The other is Downton Abbey. I like it well enough, but I'm not super into it. If I had to quit watching right now it wouldn't bother me that much. I'm not dying to know what happens. The episodes are about 15 minutes too long, and they start to drag for me toward the end. But it's mostly an enjoyable watch overall and it's something S and I can watch together which is always welcome. It's much better than Teen Mom, that's for sure. In fact, we are going to watch an episode now (of Downton Abbey, not Teen Mom), so I'm officially signing off.
No lengthy entry this week, readers, as my family has been visiting so I didn't have time to crank something out. I'll be back next week. In the meantime, enjoy two youtube clips that made me laugh hard.
