collarbone « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

collarbone

Back to class

My first class of the semester was this afternoon. This was the sky over the Samford campus later in the evening. We did the syllabus thing, and the let’s-all-get-to-know-one-another thing. This time I just asked them what was the most interesting things they did this some. Some stayed home and worked. A few took road trips. Others did work with their churches. One did a mission in Kenya.

Our students are always doing cool things like that.

Like a mean teacher, I lectured for a while. No time like the present to start in on AP Style, I always say. So we worked through a bit of that. I let them go a few minutes early, first day of classes and all that. It won’t happen often.

They had such bright eyes and took good notes today. They laughed at my jokes.

I promised them a quiz next week. They might laugh a bit less then.

Saw some faculty I haven’t seen in a while. Got to tell my collarbone story one more time. Usually these tales get better with each telling, but this one is good enough. Besides, my shoulder needs all the karma it can get just now.

Missed a meeting with a student because of my class. There will be plenty of meetings with students this week.

Football season is upon us and I’m posting photographs we found last week while sifting through archives in Auburn University’s collection in honor of this most festive time of the year. This is from some undated game. There are tons of photographs in the archives without names and dates. A shame, really. But I love this boater hat.

We were just having a conversation about the Tigers/War Eagles thing. No one wants to admit it, but War Eagles was used as a noun as recently as the 70s around here. I’m pretty sure that is what the rest of this guy’s hat says.

The guy on the left, he’s clearly seen something he didn’t care for on the field. I wonder if he’d remember this game today. That guy’s got some good hair, too. I wonder what he’s coating it in.

Everyone in the stands seemed to well dressed. These were clearly different times.

Auburn / collarbone / football / history / Monday / Samford — Comments Off
27
Aug 12

School is back in session

You write out notes to yourself, little promises on what you’ll say and do and make them think. You rehearse the first class or two. You try, mercy how you try, to get over that painfully awkward business of name and hometown and major. And then you realize you still have to redo this and polish that and so on and on.

I decided to ask what was the most exciting thing about their individual summers. That’s how I’m going to start my first class tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes.

So I did physical therapy this morning, an exceedingly lonely exercise. The ladies that walk me through each individual thing generally leave me alone. They only seem to glance my way when I happen to be doing something wrong, which is good. They are very polite about those corrections, but you know what they are thinking: You will do this right in Hercules’ name!

Last week at some point I sat on a pull down machine backward. You would have thought I’d sacked her groceries wrong.

Everything is small talk because they know for how long everyone will be there. I walked in a short timer. No need to get attached to me. They are all very good and nice people who surely know their jobs. Today I saw one of the gentlemen there adjust his colleague. This happened while I was trapped in a chair doing a stretch that involves rope and pulley and counting and he just crunched the guy on a table that sounded like it was falling apart and I could not look away.

I get a massage and it takes two-thirds of the experience just to unclench. This guy did that like he was slinging a coat over his shoulder. It was almost jaunty.

Horribly, horribly jaunty.

So one of the ladies is beating up my bicep this morning for reasons that weren’t immediately obvious. I’ve complained about it there before, but not today as far as I recall. It seems that everything I complain about — and I try to tell them a different thing each visit, just to keep them hopping — is very standard. My neck is sore, that muscle connects here. My shoulder is sore, there are two muscles that attach right back there. My bicep aches, that is a pain radiating down … and so on. Today she ground it down like I broke in front of line to get tickets to the big concert.

“I know you’re only doing it because you care,” I laughed.

“I’m doing it because it is good for you,” was her immediate response.

Wow. And whoa. I appreciate professional detachment, but I know how to parse words too. And it was not me who dinged your car door. (I park way far away, just so I don’t give these people ammunition. They can hurt me.)

I’m kidding, of course. They are all very kind. I have a few more visits with them and then, hopefully, I won’t take up a spot in their calendar anymore. Also, I’m sneaking extra reps on the weights, because I think I am strong.

So that was the morning. The rest of the day was wrapped up in syllabi and emails and PowerPoint shows and old notes. What worked in that lecture? Which things did not? Can I get all this in an hour and change? This can all go on for a while, but the nice thing is that I’ve taught the class before. It gets better every time.

Oh, and also arranging meetings. I have meetings left and right. And then left again. Remarkably every meeting I’ll have this week will be one you wouldn’t mind attending. That’s how you know you have a great job, I think.

Football season is upon us. And since we went archive diving this weekend I thought I’d add a few photographs from Auburn University’s collection — everything on display peters out around 1983 for some odd reason — in honor of this most festive time of the year. We’ll have one each day. This kid is not me:

There was no name with the photograph, but I still wonder what has become of him. Where is he saying War Eagle from this week?

collarbone / iPhone / Monday / photo — Comments Off
20
Aug 12

Photo week – Monday

A photo (or two) a day meant to express everything that needs to be said. Don’t over extrapolate or strain yourself making too many inferences. They are just pictures.

At rehab I’ve moved up to three pound weights! Three pounds! I’m so strong!

I also do more reps than they tell me too, because I am lousy in the gym. All the numbers you find there, to my mind, are really meant to be exceeded every time rather than a consistent goal. So naturally my shoulder protests a bit.

But I know I’m stronger than three pound weights.

It doesn’t seem possible that this is only my second week of physical therapy.

Auburn / collarbone / history / journalism / links / Wednesday — Comments Off
15
Aug 12

Where someone else therapeutically brutalizes my shoulder

No change in my physical therapy this morning. I did the same small exercises as in my first session on Monday.

I think there are two guys running the place with lots of younger colleagues guiding people through their paces. During the massage portion I had the other main therapist. Today was the man moving gracefully into middle age. The therapist looked like the man that sits down a few rows on the other side of your church.

His fingers were a little more narrow than his partner’s, this process takes plenty long to consider good metaphors for the therapist’s digits, but no less painful. His fingers are more the size of a screwdriver handle. He works the shoulder. There are two muscles in the damaged and surgically repaired area that go to the scapula and that, he said, explains the almost-muscle spasms.

He spends a lot of time over the incision itself, a cruel mixture of mild sensation and extreme sensation owing to the vagaries of the damaged nerves and “Hey watch it, there’s a huge surgical cut there!”

The point is to break up the scar tissue, a little now is better than a lot later. Holy moly they can work you over. He raised up my arm, impressed with my range of motion — with a little effort I can put my hurt wing completely over my head, like a touchdown call.

“There’s a big difference” he said, between 180 and 135 degrees of rotation. “Be happy with that. It takes a lot to get there.”

Things to read: Army SPC Josh Wetzel, a Glencoe, Ala. native, was wounded in Afghanistan. I wrote about him this summer for TWER.) The most recent piece of his storyinvolves a now famous picture of the Auburn fan from Walter Reed Medical Center that hangs in the White House:

The president was so moved by us praying with him on his visit that he chose this picture from the film his photographer took, had it blown up, and it now hangs in the West Wing of the White House. We said a prayer around the picture today that it would touch the lives of those who saw it and would be a catalyst for positive decision making in the Obama administration.

Seeing the picture for the first time was amazing but I think the coolest thing about it was the tour guide behind us was showing the next group the picture and said “The family in front of us is the family in this picture and the gentleman in the wheelchair is a one of our country’s wounded warriors.”

In the media think world, Jeff Jarvis says Mobile’s not the next big thing, just a path to it:

We in news and media should bring those strands together to knit a mobile strategy around learning about people and serving them better as a result — not just serving content on smaller screens. Mobile=local=me now. We should build a strategy on people over content, on relationships.

That’s what mobile means to me: a path to get us to the real value in our business.

If you view business as grounded in a relationship (some refer to it as the loyalty of, their customer) then you find that businesses need to create and then restrengthen those relationships. Media outlets, Jarvis says, need to return to that approach. The audience has to be a part of that, which may sometimes be a tricky sell. The next thing, though, would be to also monetize it.

Speaking of money, how much did USA TODAY and the Suffolk University Political Research Center spend on this survey?

Call them the unlikely voters.

A nationwide USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll of people who are eligible to vote but aren’t likely to do so finds that these stay-at-home Americans back Obama’s re-election over Republican Mitt Romney by more than 2-1. Two-thirds of them say they are registered to vote. Eight in 10 say the government plays an important role in their lives.

Even so, they cite a range of reasons for declaring they won’t vote or saying the odds are no better than 50-50 that they will: They’re too busy. They aren’t excited about either candidate. Their vote doesn’t really matter. And nothing ever gets done, anyway.

Fine story to find out their motivations — or de-motivation. There are some great statistical points of interest:

Many of the nation’s unlikely voters report hard times over the past four years. Only a third call their household finances good or excellent. Close to half say their annual household income is less than $60,000 a year. They tend to have lower levels of education than likely voters; nearly six in 10 have no more than a high school diploma.

I love the subhead. “They could turn a too-close-to-call race into a landslide for President Obama— but by definition they probably won’t.”

Maybe “They could turn a too-close-to-call race into a Reaganesque landslide for Romney — but by definition they probably won’t” didn’t sound as good around the newsroom. Or perhaps the assumption is that staying home will, in fact, do just that. The piece estimates that more than 90 million won’t vote. The subhead, then, could just as easily say “They could bolster a growing movement for the resurgent Green Part — but by definition they probably won’t.”

The story notes “Two-thirds of the unlikely voters say they voted four years ago, backing Obama by more than 2-1 over Republican John McCain.”

That is a lot of people staying at home.

Finally, a 137-year glance at the New York City skyline. The earliest picture features only the first tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. Everything changes.

collarbone / Monday — 1 Comment
13
Aug 12

I started rehab for my shoulder

“Pain and torture! Pain and torture!”

“Oooo. Good luck with that.”

I don’t know what those people were talking about. And I hope the physical therapist never finds this.

So on the way home from a visit with the ortho last week I realized that I was driving right by the rehab place. We set up a week’s worth of appointments. They checked my insurance, I filled out paperwork and I started today.

Up first was the meeting with the main therapist. He looked at the papers, asked some of the same questions, moved my arm around and had me turn and move my neck here and there and everywhere. He then handed me off to one of his colleagues. She would be the one to put me through my paces.

We started with six minutes on the hand bike, three minutes forward and three minutes back, just to stretch. This, of course, is the sort of circular thought that appeals to me. Oddly enough, because I’m turning my shoulders, my form is worse on a hand bike than it is on a bicycle. Rock, rock, rock.

Then there were resistance bands. Pin the elbow to the ribs and pull against the band, both across the body and then, turning around, through the body. “Two sets of 20,” she said. Naturally I did more.

Then there was a bit of neck resistance. There’s a curved aluminum bar that comes from the wall and has a foam pad on the other end which is designed to make you feel as silly as possible. Twenty nods forward, turn around, 20 nods back.

And then, perhaps my favorite part, were the bicep curls. I’m working on the one-pounders. (I’m not supposed to hold anything heavier than a drink in a glass, after all.) Two sets of 20, forward, to the side and to the back; naturally I did more. I don’t know why. No one is proving anything with a one pound barbell. But it is a gym setting, and 20 always feels like a low number of reps … so I usually do 30 or 40 of whatever it is.

Resistance curls on the nautilus equipment, rowing on another. There was stretching in a giant cage that looked like a defensive end’s facemask. Finally there was more resistance stretching of the arm on a rope and pulley system.

None of this is exciting. All of it has a purpose. Most of it feels silly. But that’s OK, I’m getting better! That’s what counts!

Oh, wait, here’s the massage table and — the lead therapist has fingers the size of medicine bottles and they are as solid as the head of a hammer. He puts these things into my shoulder blade, and into and over the incision. The sensation hasn’t entirely come back to that area, but you can feel this. He gets just past that hurts-so-good massage feeling and flirts with the “Would you please stop? I’m about to cause a scene” level. He is brilliant. This is to break up the scar tissue, among other things, and is admittedly painful now, but helpful later.

Maybe this is what everyone was talking about.

He wore out my shoulder blade. I’d told him about the feeling that I was about to spasm across my back (the muscles connect, so this makes sense) and he spent a lot of time just pummeling my shoulder.

And then he hooked me up to electricity for 10 minutes, as high as I could tolerate it. The current stimulates muscle contraction and blood flow. Feels like ants crawling on your arm, and was more mild than any time I’ve ever managed to grab a hot wire.

I was more interested in his ice pack. I’m afraid I’ve developed something of a habit with the stuff. We live about six minutes from the rehabilitation place. I put on more ice when I got home.