Monday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Monday

Monday / overwriting — Comments Off
10
Sep 12

The onomatopoeia of our appliances

Mondays are nothing terrible. Or overly much original or fun. They are inside days. There are no great pictures, or inspiring visuals with tinkling bits of bed music.

I should make more videos. I have a note, I wrote somewhere in a note to myself in one of my notebooks, that says “Shoot more video.”

Many of my notes wind up in my notebooks. Fancy that. The problem with that statement is the plurality. Many books mean less review, which means less remembering, meaning, in this instance, fewer videos.

I did laundry this evening, can you tell? There’s something about the repetitive sounds — next time don’t tune it out, really listen to what your Kenmore is trying to tell you. There’s some sort of story in that kerchunk kerchunck kerchunk, gurgle and blurble. There’s meaning in the chaos of the woosh of the drain.

There’s not, really, a meaning there. I’ve been spending a lot of time with words and commas today, and it can make you a bit silly.

And so I will leave you with this, a profound thing I read somewhere. The sentiment is more important than the original location, I think:

I do tend to repeat myself a bit, but only for the sake of emphasis.

I’m going to put this is in the signature file of my emails. This is only here, again, because it was important the first time. If I felt I’d explained it earlier, you wouldn’t be reading this. My apologies for not having enough time to make the original telling more clear.

Kerchung, kerchung, kerchung, whirrr —

I’ve noticed that the dryer, which turns itself off, can also turn itself back on for a few extra revolutions. I wonder what that means.

Monday — Comments Off
3
Sep 12

Labor Day

“It looks like it is going to rain.”

“I need to mow the lawn, too.”

Twenty minutes go by …

“Where is that rain?”

“I bet you could mow the lawn before it gets here.”

Who needs those extra 20 minutes, anyway?

So I mowed. Or chopped. The backyard was threatening to get out of control. There was the top-mow, the cross-mow and the clipping-mow. Parts of the backyard did take all three passes. All that nice green stuff reduced to a lot less.

It was sticky and humid. For a while, for variety, we tried humid and sticky. I felt two raindrops.

Doing the backyard is plenty of exertion for my shoulder. I did manage to turn it into a nice stretching exercise, but I can only take so much. Besides, the clouds were changing, so I put away the mower, moved the clipping bags to their appropriate location and closed up the house.

After a shower, and before I could finish my sandwich at lunch, the monsoon arrived. It knocked out the power. We sat quietly in the semi-dark. The clouds were a thick and foreboding gray. I began to wonder if the battery in my phone could last forever, because tonight, two thousand one two party over, oops, out of time, tonight we’re gonna party like it’s eighteen ninety-nine.

The rain picked up. This was now good napping weather. I listened to the water rush off the roof and found myself wondering how far I could stretch our food supplies if they forgot to connect our street back to the grid.

Two hours later I woke up. The power was back on. Life had returned to normal.

The grass in the backyard was twice as tall as this morning.

The rest of the evening was spent working on lectures and schedules and various other detailed things. I wrote gobs of emails. We had a delicious dinner based on vegetables and shrimp. It rained some more.

I had to tie a rope around my waist to find my way back in from the backyard, where we now have a gently burbling brook.

Mowing the lawn this morning was entirely worth it.

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.

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.