My ‘list’ last night read:
1. Email Kevin
2. Vacuum
3. Fix Flat
4. Bike

Apparently what it should have read was:
1. Hang around the front yard with Dogie and Little Shitter (the bird), talking to neighbors.

And that’s just fine by me…

Meine Aufgabenliste las so aus:
1. Kevin emailen
2. Staubsaugen
3. Reife flicken
4. Fahrrad fahren

Anscheinend hätte ich sie so schreiben sollen:
1. Im Hof mit Dogie und Little Shitter (der Vogel) herumstehen und mit den Nachbaren quatschen.

Und das geht so…

i have been to the desert, and to the garden, and to the neighbors’ garden. i have pictures of some of these things and not of others.

now i just have to sit down long enough to upload them to flickr…

I am off crutches! Still in the hard boot, but i have no crutches falling over at my desk today! My foot has been achy as the muscles are starting to get used again, and the ankle joint hurts now and then as well, but nothing too major. Not exactly super mobile yet, but things are looking up.

destination alchemy

i am not someone of words. yet i love words, marvel in their many meanings and variety, dissecting sentences for their ‘real’ meanings inferred out of ambiguous and tenuous words, but i use them clumsily myself resulting in nagging thoughts that i may have been misunderstood as i dissect my own ramblings at a later time – especially if i have used many words, spoken for ‘too long’ or about ‘too much’.

Not being able to crawl around on the ground, floor, wall, etc. with my camera has been a bit silencing. I can make sketches – sort of; i am out of practice – but the view is often a panorama of my foot, which looks like it should be painted green and appearing in a disney animation (although i would forbid any part of my self from appearing in anything disney).

Luckily, SOP understands when I say ‘look at that [random thing] there’, and likely quickly sees the unusual aspect of that particular [cloud formation, color gradient on a petal, cheeky squirrel, stealthy cat] that drew my eye, so the daily walks are as interesting as always, if somewhat shorter at the moment.

DOG and SOP have been great at putting up with me over the past month. DOG has been quite protective, causing my 5-year-old neighbor to give him the super-hero moniker of ‘Protective DOGE*!’ which she says is a great super-hero name for him because it rhymes with Doge**. Quite right.

In other news, i have been reading a lot – which actually represents more healing on the post-suicide front, an amazing 7(!?) years later. So much sitting is a challenge for me, though. I’m at the point where the major trauma healing seems to be over and, as I cannot yet be very active, I am having difficulty sleeping. But the stitches were removed last Friday and I have just started to be able to put some weight on the injured leg. The doctor expects me to just be using one crutch by the end of this week and just the boot by the beginning of next. That seems very rapid after the month it has taken me to get here, but I am working hard toward that goal (foot flexes, weighting with each step) and am really excited to see it coming. My calf and thigh look quite shapeless and small at the moment. They are going to be getting quite a workout soon.

* Pronounced doughj
** Also pronounced doughj, and how we address the DOG when not like ‘doughjee’, ‘buddy’, ‘my friend’, or ’superfreak’

Bald schreibe ich wieder auf Deutsch…

me: you know what has struck me since i broke my fibula?
sop: that you’re not super-human?

Besides not being super-human, i have been struck by a couple of things. The first is the extent of the inaccessibility of our campus. I always thought our area was pretty bad, plotting out wheelchair paths for students in my head, but i realized the other day that it is even worse than i thought. The campus goes uphill, and must be terraced by its own nature. The building in which i work is on the southern end of the main campus, with plenty of buildings east and west of us. However, to get to any of the buildings to the west, you will have to go a good ways to the north before being able to go back downhill and to the south. However, the building directly west of us has a bridge to go into its 2nd floor and an elevator that goes down to the first. My belief has been that this would be the way to go if you were in a wheelchair, rather than go around the library from our building. To get to the bookstore, for example, you should go to this building directly west of us and use the elevator, then go over to the bookstore. The route around the library extends the length of this trip by about a fifth of a mile. Not far, but when you only have 15 minutes between classes, it can definitely make a difference.

I learned this week, however, that none of the doors on the second floor of said building have automatic openers. I, being on crutches, can manage, but someone in a wheelchair? A further annoyance was that the redid the library recently and re-terraced the southern side of it – with only stairs. I was shocked at the time, and am even more shocked now that i realize the ’short-cut’ i thought was there doesn’t really exist. And all it needs is one retro-fitted door.

The second thing that has struck me is the variety of people’s attitudes toward injury. Reading needled and comments people have been making to her made me wonder about this even more. Seriously, when i told one person that my doctor said it would be 3 – 4 months before i could run again this person said, “oh, no, it will be at least a year” and went on to tell me of all the pain and problems i would have based off her experience – with a completely shattered talus. Not to downplay the fact that it will be work, but these are two separate injuries. I’ve also had people tell me that my ankle will always be weak, because they hurt their ankle and now it is weak. But i have no tendon damage, so really, it should not be any weaker once it has healed. Again, different injuries. Many people seem to love worst-case-scenarios. Of course, most of these people I find otherwise fabulous, so I can’t linger on this one attribute anyway.

I also feel pretty lucky that i did not have many doom-sayers after Rich’s death. Perhaps because no one knew really what to say at all. Death and grieving are difficult subjects and suicide even more difficult, of course. It probably helped that it was not an observable injury. Random strangers did not approach me to say how I would never be the same, although in that case is was certainly true – if not always in a tragic way. Despite our culture’s love of the idea of there being only one ’soul mate’ for each of us, we tend not to tell someone who has just lost their partner that they ‘will never be happy again’. Thank goodness.