Blog of Magic Cheese

The Good News: No broken bones! \o/

The Bad News: All of the ligaments in my ankle are torn, and the doctor just laughed when I asked when I would be able to run and climb and do wushu again. /o\

As I stump around San Francisco in my massively velcroed ambidextrous boot, I have learned some new things from my limited mobility.

The 31 bus, which I had always bypassed in favor of the much farther away but faster and remotely reliable 38L, is super ghetto, but has soul. Black people get on and sing worship songs, tiny wizened old Japanese guys sit next to me and do sudoku puzzles, and people greet one another when they get on. Where else could you see a young Latino boy blasting Riverdance music on his iPod nano?

Of course, ghetto means that more than half of the time the bus smells of urine and that last week a giant black man in a Bruce Lee shirt swore and took a swing at an elderly Latino man in a wheelchair who was just trying to get around him, then tried to kick a tiny Chinese lady as she went by. Who picks on people in wheelchairs and the elderly? Then all of the old Chinese people on the bus screamed at him in chorus for about five minutes while we English speakers asked what the hell his problem was. That was pretty cool.

If Bruce Lee was alive, I'll bet he would have come flying out of that shirt just to kick that guy in right in his misplaced aggression. I wish he'd had the guts to face me himself, but I guess a young woman on crutches was just too scary for him.

... or so the delusion runs, anyway.

Every now and again, it's good to have your delusions reinforced by a certified doctor.

Mine is amazed that I'm stumping around easily with das boot chained to my left leg and in no pain. Apparently so long as my ankle is immobile, I have free reign to walk as much as I like, and to stand on the foot if I so desire. The only concern was that my muscles or hips would cramp up with the extra weight of the Megaman foot, which they do not. Back kicks in wushu practice are so added to the repertoire!

If you don't understand the title of this post, you should go and see the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. I'm buying it on the strength of the "IMMORTAL AND MADE OF STONE" line alone. Jesse, Rob, and I have been tacking it onto everything and shouting it at one another for weeks now, far beyond the point that it should have remained funny, and are now so far sunk into the depths of dorkdom that our normal friends have started avoiding us.

I bring up mutants for a reason, since this latest injury and subsequent x-rays of my foot have turned up even more oddities than I knew of before. I knew I had unusually large bones in my big toes, an accessory navicular (extra bone on the inside of the foot above the arch), I knew I had a spare bit of bone in the back of the heel that hadn't ossified, and now I know that I also have a hole in the bone connected to my big toe, where there should be a joint but mine never grew/sealed. Very rare, apparently. When I die I want to donate my feet to science. For science! That is, if I were not immortal. And MADE OF STONE.

because as much as I love my job, and as fun as I find my cool wooden desk with the seahorses carved in it and my bags of dried fruit and snacks and typing with my friends while I do my job, I have been looking out the window at the sun and wanting to scream and jump out of my chair all day.

I've taken like, 20 trips to the kitchen and the bathroom because I can't keep still. My shoulders are starting to cramp from the strain of keeping myself sitting. Even listening to Death Cab for Cutie's not helping.

Spring is here and the sap is running. (: This is a terrible time to be injured. I want to go to the Mission Cliffs gym and run around in circles and climb the walls until I'm too tired to be restless and jittery any more. Maybe I can just stump up and down the stairs here at work and go home and do sword flowers until I collapse.

Whenever my socks come out of the dryer perfectly paired with no one missing a partner, I do a little dance.