My Level of Awareness

You know that stereotype of the “absent minded professor”? The one who shows up to lecture in his bedroom slippers, with the bedhead hair, and the distant, hazy tone in his voice? The one that can hold a completely coherent conversation on string theory and its recent fall from favor in the quest for the unifying paradigm, and yet puts the cat in the fridge instead of out the back door?

I see that person every day in the mirror when I brush my teeth.

This isn’t so much of an issue when I am more, um, self-correcting than I have the ability to be right now. But in my current state of dependency, it has been a source of embarrassment (to me) and annoyance (to everyone else).

Have I ever mentioned that I have four flights of stairs in my house? That it is impossible to access a bathroom in my house without ascending at least one of them?

Oh, yeah. Crutches are a complete blast.

I am capable of ascending and descending the stairs. I am capable of most things, really. But it all requires major planning and orchestration, worthy of a big stage production, and there is a line between what I CAN do, and what I am SUPPOSED to be doing. That line is hard. Hard because I can SEE over it. Hard because I can even cross it. And hard because of the consequences when I do. An aching lower back and strained arms is one thing - but a re-broken or displaced bone is another. And God forbid I fall down the stairs and break the other leg. I don’t even want to contemplate the consequences of that.

But staying on the good girl side of the line means that every person that I live and work with ends up at the mercy of my foggy-headed absentmindedness. Every time I reach the top of the stairs and realize I forgot to put the-absolutely-needed-object-of-the-moment in my backpack, it means somebody with two good legs is going to have to make the trip up and down and relocate the object from one of the many creative and non-intuitive hiding places that I manage to put it down in. If I empty my water glass, somebody else has to make the trip to the kitchen (glass and liquids are very unforgiving to my current state of gracelessness - the combination is a veritable time bomb). If I get into the shower before I pulled out a towel, or the pants I want to wear are in the dryer, someone else has to retrieve them. Contrary to popular belief, being waited on hand and foot is stressful when you aren’t paying the servants. Sometimes I would rather just go thirsty or uncomfortable or bored because asking someone else, for the fiftieth time that day, to fetch whateveritisIneed is just too much angst to bear.

It has taught me two important lessons:

1. The people I live and work with are incredibly patient people.
2. Stairs, as an architectural feature, are highly overrated.

Some of you have noticed a dearth of, for lack of a better term, substance, here at My Level lately. Not that this seems to bother most of you. I have said before - post deep thoughts about human nature and you get crickets chirping. Post about concrete Mexicans, and the world loves you. I suspect it has something to do with the popularity of reality TV, but that’s speculation on my part.

At present the only deep thoughts I am thinking are so introspective and whiny, that it truly would reinforce to the world that bloggers, and specifically mommy-bloggers really are the worst kind of naval gazers. I would add narcissistic, but that would imply a degree of self-regard that I am not sure applies here. Self-examination is closer to my reality at present.

In short, I am tired. I am tired of the unpleasantness in the world that I know exists, the moral outrage that I know I should (and do) feel. I find myself avoiding the news. I know children suffer and die. I know that corruption is bleeding the country. I know stupidity and cruelty and evil exists. I just can’t face it right now with any strength of conviction.

Do you think,’ said Candide, ‘that men have always massacred each other, as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and silly?’ ~ Candide, Voltaire

And knowing the worst that the world has to offer, I have even less time and energy for the petty squabbling that every social circle, small and large, seems to spawn at a by-the-moment rate. I am tired of the trappings of self-importance taken at the expense of others, the subtle put-downs, the shallow posturing. It seems so ridiculous taken in the wide view. I have simply ceased caring who has done what to whom with what blunt social construct. So don’t tell me about them. I don’t care.

What I want right now are very simple things.

To spend time with my son and my husband.

To knit.

To get up at night to pee without a major production that wakes the entire house (impossible in a cast with crutches).

A hot bath. I would sacrifice a small chicken for a hot bath instead of showering on a plastic stool.

People are suffering all around the world much worse than I am. I get that. Really.

I just want to tend my garden.

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable. ~Candide, Voltaire.

I crochet.  I learned on my grandmother’s knee when I was seven years old and I have done it on and off all my life.  But put two needles in my hand and I was flummoxed, even though I always WANTED to learn how to knit.

Well, given that I have had a bit of time on my hands (and off my legs), it was a good time to start.  I only needed a bit of inspiration.

And Shep kindly provided that for me.  He mentioned that he wanted a Jayne Cobb hat from the late, great,  Joss Whedon series, Firefly.  Now that I can learn to knit for.

So I present, without further ado, my first knitting project:

Otherwise known as “The hat that swallowed Harry.”

Have I mentioned that Shep has a REALLY big head?

Literally.

Every woman out there is going to sympathize with me today. Because I don’t think there is one of you that hasn’t had a day where you have thought “If I don’t get this [insert offending, constricting, hideous garment of choice here] off of my body RIGHT THIS SECOND I am going to run screaming into the street.”

Unfortunately, whereas we do not have an overly restrictive dress code at my office, I think that they generally frown on going down the hall without pants on.

Said pants are hitting the Salvation Army bag THE VERY MOMENT I get home.

(Edited to add: It’s a sad day when you have a broken leg and the cast is NOT the most uncomfortable thing you are wearing)

I finally got in to see the specialist yesterday about my leg. After-hour clinics are basically equipped to evaluate whether you are dying (in which case they send you off immediately to a hospital with real doctors) or not dying (in which case they tell you that you are not dying and give you a referral to see real doctors at a later date). In my case, I was very much not dying, but only in excruciating pain. Which means that they didn’t get my referral until a full three days later, with a total of five days between the time of the injury and actually being seen by the real doctor.

The real doctor, an orthopedist in my case, confirmed that, yes, I had indeed broken my leg. As leg breaks go, if you really have to have one, mine isn’t the bad way to go. The fracture is in the fibula, the thin bone at the outside of the shin involved in stabilizing the ankle. It isn’t a simple break, however, since it spirals around the bone and there is some splintering involved.

The short version of this evaluation is that:

Good news - I get to have a boot, not a cast. Which means I can take it off to wash. For a person with a pathological aversion to being dirty who bathes twice a day, this was very good news.

Bad news - Even though the fibula is “not weight-bearing”, I apparently may NOT put any weight on it. Yeah. Scratched my head on that one, too. But in practical terms, this means I can ONLY take the boot off to wash, and it must stay on at all other times. And that I cannot actually walk on my “walking cast”. In fact, in an ideal world, I should be laying down “with my shin above my knee and my knee above my heart” when I am not answering the call of nature.

Riiiiiigggghhhht. I can see myself doing THAT for four weeks.

In the real world, the world I can actually live and work in, this translates to: “No walking except on crutches, no driving, and oh-by-the-way those waterpark season passes? Useless.”

I do not do helpless well. I must be the world’s shittiest patient. I see dishes on the sink or my son’s toys littering the floor and I go almost completely spastic with the need to clean them up. I do not like to ask my coworkers to fill my water bottle or get my document off the printer. I would rather put blisters under my arms from the crutches or become a slave to my office chair. I am becoming a contortionist from the complex act of putting my underwear on in the morning around the boot, because I cannot STAND the humiliation of asking for help with that most basic of personal care issues.

I have no doubt that this bone is going to be just fine in a couple of months.

But I may very well be batshit crazy by then.

1. Those motorized carts in the stores aren’t nearly as fun or as fast as they look, nor do they come close to fitting in a dressing room or between clothing racks.
2. I will never again take for granted immersing my entire body in a bathtub.  Or carrying my own coffee cup down a hall.
3. Armpits bruise rather easily.
4. Being unable to drive in rural America is a serious personal independence issue.
5. So is having control of the TV remote.
6. My next house will have no stairs at all.  I swear it by all that is holy.
7. I am eternally grateful that I am not a single parent.
8. When you are crying from pain, hearing “It will be okay, Mommy, don’t worry” makes you cry more.  But not from pain.  And kisses from three-year-old boys are great analgesics.
9. I was not born to sit still; it’s simply not a part of the programming.

Mine started with a 4-6 inch spiral fracture in my right fibula.

You?

Otherwise titled “The post in which I get all petulant and stamp my feet.”

I usually approve all my comments. In fact, there is only one non-spam comment I have ever NOT approved.

A while back, a semi-regular reader (at least from the IP address and my hit-counter) posted a comment to one of my posts that has sat in my moderation queue for some time. I didn’t approve it for two reasons.

First, it had nothing to do with the post that it was commenting on.

Second, it linked to a moderately well-known polemic blogger whose rantings I really don’t feel like giving any more exposure to.

I am not going to divulge who the post linked to, but one of his more regular spoutings of idiocy revolves around the idea is that women have brains that are not equipped for the pursuit of hard science, and by allowing entry of these “inferior” minds into the fields that we are dumbing down scientific pursuit and science is suffering as the result.

Well now.

I generally try to avoid that kind of narrow, extreme commentary. Mostly because I find it faintly ridiculous from personal experience. I have always been at the top of my class in mathematics. In NY, the tests are graded electronically, standardized across the state and are gender-blind. I have a minor in mathematics and made straight A’s through physical biochemistry and quantum mechanics. I made a perfect score on the Analytical section of the GRE, and scored above 750 on the other two sections. I was an NSF Graduate Fellow. I don’t need to play the gender card to compete.

I chose life science because it interested me, not because I am incapable of “hard science”. I started my degree in engineering, and made high marks until I decided I found it boring. I didn’t go into the fields of engineering and physics because I didn’t want to, not because I “didn’t make the cut.”

I didn’t want to enter these pursuits because, like a huge chunk of scientific academia, they generally do not allow any balance in your life. I looked around at most of the people I knew who were “successful” in those fields and I made the startling realization that I didn’t want to be like them; I have a very different definition about what a satisfying life is, and how contribution to society is measured. It is the same reason I didn’t go to medical school (and I WAS accepted [insert stamp of foot here]).

I don’t think the gender disparity has diddly to do with ability. It has to do with inclination.

I also avoid that particular type of commentator because it is impossible to have any kind of informed debate with them and pointless to try. Their minds have closed to any other options outside their own pontification, and will only accept as valid the narrow range of data that support their particular slant on life. Frankly, life is just too short, and has too much richness of experience offered to bother wasting time on that flavor of stupidity. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. And I am entitled to ignore it. Or occasionally point and laugh.

I may be accused of being a dilettante, but I only get one pass at this life, and I want the whole enchilada, not just a narrow slice. I am not saying that the pursuit of science does not enhance the quality of life. I think it can be argued that it has benefited millions, if not billions, of people, reduced suffering and saved lives. But intellectualism is not the entire font of human contentment and scientific accomplishment is not the full measure of a life well-lived.

This is the only life I get, my one passage through this world.

It’s not that I’m not smart.

I am just not that altruistic.

Ever had one of those headaches where shoving a drill through your cheekbones for drainage suddenly seems like not only a rational idea, but a preferable one?

Except for the fact that if you do, your head might explode like a popped balloon, leaving a empty sack of skin dangling from your neck.

And I said I have no imagination…