As a Languid Torch

Just about a week ago, I took a nasty spill off my mountain bike while, of all things, riding home from working out. It wasn't gruesome, as I managed to tuck and roll just in time. I only had a minor road-rash on my left forearm, but the brunt of my fall ended up directly on the connective tissue between my left clavicle and acromion. Interesting fact; in attempting to find the impressive sounding name 'acromion', aka the shoulder socket bones (and, be honest, you were impressed), I came across the information that a clavicle fracture is the most common breakage in adults, accounting for 1 out of 20 adult bones broken. Hrm...imagine that.

In fact, I have been worrying on and off this past week whether I actually did break something. I got back most of my movement by the third day, but I've still got some shooting pains and a fairly intriguing bump where there shouldn't be one. Considering the persistence of this thing, I actually went to the campus doc's office for a couple x-rays today. Luckily, they didn't see anything broken; just some severely inflamed tendons.

But there's a bigger problem. I think I've been using this lack-of-a-left-arm thing as an excused to make myself feel better about not doing anything with my days. AS (what's your middle name?) has been calling me trying to get me back to the gym. True, I can't lift weights or really do any upper-body stuff so far, but I haven't even been keeping up with my running. And this is a week off (ok, I did go once) after being at the gym 6 days a week so far this summer. Even more, I don't think I'm living up to Shaw's ideal, brightly burning torch, as I quoted in my last post.

Bouncing at night is great, as 1) I'm already going to be awake and 2) it leaves my days completely free for productivity. But while I've been getting up at 7 or 8, eating breakfast, reading my comic strips (and the news), I end up going back to bed for another couple hours for a lack of anything better to do. Which is a lie. I have so much I could be doing - interesting books I could be reading, some furniture refinishing projects in their final stages, even a couple e-mails to friends which are overdue. The problem is that, at 9 or 10 in the morning, all of that can be done later in the day. But after having gone back to bed, I wake up again with the same mentality: There's always tomorrow, or next week, or after I move up to Madison. But that leaves each day in-between a complete waste of breath. And we've only got so many (though I've decided I'm going to live to 117, just so you know).

The point of this post is to publicly let forth my barbaric yawp from the rooftops of the world: Tomorrow, no more wasted breaths. I'm going to get up and be ready to do whatever doesn't directly cause my shoulder to scream (really, it screams...scared the shit out of the girl on the elliptical next to me the other day) at the gym first thing in the morning. Then, after a shower and shave (the lack of which is a great indicator of how much I haven't been doing anything with my time) I'm going to actually do something with my day. I'll let you know how it goes, but the overall point is to do one thing, each day, directly promoting each of my ideals. I know, it sounds lofty. But, for example, my ideal for my first action upon waking up is to look good naked (in the words of Lester Burnham). I'll let you know how that's going, too.