If I Was a Horse, They'd Shoot Me

My doctors call it "cervical facet syndrome". I work in the medical field and therefore have extensive knowledge of important medical facts so I feel safe in saying that this probably translates to "your neck is really effed up and we don't particularly know why it did that and it sucks to be you." Or something like that. Anyway, I spent a chunk of yesterday letting a medical type person slide a little thin needle into the joint between my 2nd and 3rd cervical vertabra and fill it full of medicine guaranteed to hurt like hell and make me dizzy and off-balance so I look drunk and have the headache as if I was drunk but didn't actually get to sit with my friends in a bar and throw down beverages with dangerous sounding names. Modern medicine is a miracle, isn't it?

Okay, yes, it will help the pain once it absorbs and I quit running into things. And yes, it will help my popularity if I quit whining. But the upshot is that I laid around a lot when I got home after the shish-kebabing (oddly, they prefer I refer to it as facet injections...but I think I can safely say I know how chicken satay feels at this point) and therefore had time for all sorts of weird thoughts. For instance:

Have you ever noticed how much the media lies to you? Not the serious stuff--that's fodder for a different sort of post. I mean the stuff like in the movies where the hot young couple showers together and it's all steamy and soapy and romantic and it just looks so wonderful and tempting. But they never show the truth of each of you standing with about 1/4 of your body actually in the warm water, your tushie freezing, soap drying on the part of you that you can't get far enough under the water to rinse, and one or both of you getting an elbow in the eye while the other one tries to wash their hair in the scant teaspoon of hot water that's made it to their head.

The movies also like to show the busy career woman, returning home at the end of a long day in a perfect suit with undamaged nylons, clicking across the entryway in high heels while she opens the mail with a perfectly glossed fingernail. Her hair is perfect, and her make-up is unsmudged. When I finally straggle in the door, I usually find that my scrub pants have managed to get a knot in the drawstring so that I have to dance frantically while trying to untie them before I pee myself, my hair looks like I was dragged through a hedge backwards, the mail has spilled out of my armloads of crap and, if I'm really lucky, it's landed on some rodent body-part that the cats left for me. If I gird my loins and pick it up anyway, it will be a flyer telling me that I can save money on hearing aids this month at ACME Hearing Aids, Inc. The woman in the movie will curl up prettily on the couch while nibbling on a salad and sipping at wine. I will suck down a few gummi bears and try to convince myself that I really can make something appetizing from a half a cup of freezer-burned corn and a box of pizza rolls. The only wine in the place will be me, whining because once again the house failed to self clean while I was gone.

In one famous movie, a man blindfolded his girlfriend and led her to the fridge and drizzled all kinds of sexy food on her and fed her things and it was terribly erotic. At my house, it would probably be a bit more pedestrian. For one thing, the time it would take to warm up the honey and get the crystals out of it so it could actually be drizzled or poured would likely kill the mood. For another, it just isn't all that sexy to have to stop and sniff inside containers to see if the food inside has reached any sort of toxic state. And for a third, I just don't have a lot of sexy food. It's hard to look hot with a bag of granola and a sugar free pudding cup. And don't forget those pizza rolls.

In the movies, the heroine always cries very prettily--one perfect tear sliding down her expertly made up cheek. She is more beautiful than ever and the hero cannot resist her. If I cry, I acquire a clown nose, I make graceless, hiccuping noises, and I'm likely to leave snot on the perfectly tailored suit sleeve of the hero. And I'll look like an albino rabbit after a night in a smoke-filled room for about 7 hours.

Bathtubs in movies are always huge--more than large enough to accomodate a stretched out and lovely woman with stragically placed bubbles that last for hours. There are candles and flowers and a glass of wine. Her hair is piled loosely on her head and, when she takes it down, it will tumble down her back in a waterfull of soft curls. In my world, every indoor bathtub I've ever gotten into has left me the choice of warm feet or warm upper body but not both. The bubble bath lasts about 5 minutes before dissolving into a greasy bathtub ring that defies every drop of elbow grease I can summon, my hair is yanked back in a hot pink scrunchie that makes me look like an aging Cabbage Patch doll, and the one time I tried the candle thing, the cat knocked it into the bathwater and nicely doused my leg with liquid wax into the bargain (yes, you can get a free legwax at Chez Knitingale, but you can't be picky about which three inches of leg).

New moms in the movies are made up and have lovely hair and look prettily tired. New moms in real life are generally dressed in spit up, look like they've gone two rounds with a brick wall, and have no idea what time it is. Children in movies are precocious and clever and always say innocently witty things. Children in real life test their mother's patience the same way you test spaghetti--by throwing it viciously against a wall one strand at a time. They do lovely things like announce the new name they learned for their genitalia while you're waiting in line at the bank, become "boneless" and fall whining to the ground when they don't want to do what you want them to anymore, and turn that cunningly planned outfit into a walking disaster within five minutes of putting it on in a perfectly clean, dry room.

Oh, and no one ever goes shopping in the movies without purchasing a baguette. I don't know why this is, but watch next time--see if there isn't one of them sticking out the top of an unwrinkled paper bag (I guess movie people don't drop the grocery bag in the parking lot and roll half the oranges under the car, either).

See, weird thoughts. I'm going to go lay on some ice for my neck and a heating pad for my back. In theory, it should rain somewhere around my shoulder blades when that cool front reaches the warm one.

I'm going to start crocheting edging on the squares and maybe sewing some together this weekend. There will be miner's blankets. I won't look like Michelle Pfeiffer while I'm doing it...but there you are. Another Hollywood lie.