Only a week away… south of Italy, here I come.
On the other hand, I think living in America severely distorted my view of vacation time. I’m going to be there for two weeks and that sounds extremely long to me. My husband said to me last night “Oh, I’ve been there for 4, 5 weeks at a time.” Yikes! That’s not a vacation, that’s temporary relocation!
Yay! Now I can become an English teacher.
Next comes the real work — finding a job!
When I was a kid, I would spend a ton of time on the play structure at the playground. You couldn’t keep me off of that thing, and I’d do all kinds of crazy tricks and acrobatics that probably could have quite easily gotten me killed if I had happened to fall.
So yesterday, imagine my surprise when I was with the kids that I babysit at the playground, and I actually managed to hurt myself!
I didn’t think it would be that bad. I haven’t been on a play structure since I was 13, maybe, so I knew that I had to watch my step. I obviously don’t have the skillz that I once had when I was young.
So when I followed Valentina onto the play structure to make sure she didn’t fall, and helped her cross the rickety rope thing, we came to the end, which was quite high up. A fire-pole was the only way down, and a two-year old certainly cannot take something like that on.
“Okay, wait here, I’ll go down and then help you down,” I said. So I grabbed the fire pole with both hands and got ready to get some footing in order to slide down. However that didn’t exactly go as planned, and I lost my footing almost immediately. The bottom half of my body swung down, hard, while I still gripped the pole for dear life.
At the time, it hurt, but I didn’t think it was that bad. Until I went to bed later that night and realized that my abdomen was in extreme and unberable pain.
So I’ve just been to the doctor and he confirmed exactly what I expected — that by losing my footing and my legs dropping down so fast, I pulled all of my abdominal and lower back muscles.
And mother of god, they hurt! What I don’t understand is how I became so weaksauce. When I was a kid I used to swing down from poles and monkey bars like I was a monkey! Now, I can’t even take a simple loss of footing without needing a trip to the doc.
All day I have felt like I am 90 years old or something, having to grab my back and get my husband to help me out of bed.
I still remember being in 4th grade and having a teacher who was 60 years old. My friends and I were doing our usual acrobatics on the monkey bars at recess: hanging upside-down, swinging around by our ankles, and other such dangerous things. Then there was the Flip. The Flip was this thing we would do to show off. It involved reaching around under the bars, grabbing the bottom, falling off headfirst and letting your legs swing over you.
I saw our teacher walking past one recess time, and I said “Okay, let’s show him the Flip.”
We all called out his name and told him to watch, and then performed our world-renowned trick.
“That’s really something,” he said.
“I know!” I replied. “And I bet you can’t do that!”
“I bet I can!”
So my fucking 60-year old teacher gets up on the monkey bars and performs the best Flip I have ever seen to this day.
That day I felt so defeated. As I feel now, when I recall that story. A 60 year old man can pull off a Flip, but I can’t take a simple fall!
