the last month
hellooooooo I have sheepishly returned after an unplanned month-long hiatus because life kicked up a few gears in the last month and I’ve been playing catch up and slow down.
As most of the reader base of this blog knows, it was my birthday and it was wonderful and glorious and sweet and glittering. It’s a birthday that I will remember for a long time, for many different reasons, and it totally did not go as planned, but it was filled with love and joy and celebration and that’s all that really matters. To sum it up, I’m unbelievably lucky to get to love the people I do, and I hope I can keep doing that for a long long time.
In other news, I spent most of the month working and developing a growing collection of mild health problems. So far, my left hip click/pain came back, my right wrist is fucked (rip badminton/knitting/typing/scrolling/taking lids off of jars), my jaw is trying to grind itself out of existence, and…my foot keeps cramping randomly?
I got a massage today and the very nice masseuse said that my back was cracking and popping like fresh rice krispies (rough translation) and that she bruised her hands massaging me lol. She used a gua sha during it, and indeed gua’d up some sha (for anyone who doesn’t know the traditional chinese medicine origins of gua sha, it’s used to balance qi by forcing your body to release…the hot qi…and it ends up looking like a giant hickey on gua sha’d area…and the “gua” means scraping and the “sha” literally means sand, but in this context refers to the little broken capillaries that look like grains of…blood - ok so this is a terrible explanation but I’m also super far from educated on TCM and my brain is only like 25% recovered from the all nighters i pulled in the last month).
Some random thoughts/shouts I’ve accumulated over the last month:
- I was making some good progress on the biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder I was reading when I got staffed on this deal from hell, so I will not be finishing that book because I’m deeming it bad juju. I’ve become like my dog, who after getting her leash stuck on a rock in the backyard once as a puppy, never trusted that area of the backyard again. 16 years and counting.
- When I get little enough sleep, it feels like I’m floating. Like this guy
- Experiences that I thought were luxurious and special and relaxing as a young person who didn’t do them, like massages or facials, are actually things that are just kind of painful/uncomfortable to me now. It feels like massages are something I have to do from time to time to attempt to rectify the harms I’ve done to my body, and facials feel like…being smothered.
- I already learned this lesson the hard way when I hurt my ankle a few years back, but physical mobility and a pain-free existence really are such a privilege. And I forgot that so quickly, even though when I first moved to this city I couldn’t stand for more than an hour without my ankle doubling in size. But I’ve now officially reached the age where human bodies begin deteriorating and you have to actively (attempt to) fight that off, so I don’t think I’ll be forgetting again anytime soon.