I won’t be windsurfing.
Instead, I’ll be walking around in the post-acupuncture blissed-out haze I’ll be fortunate to have. Someone cancelled, and this back of mine that has been wonky since last Wednesday will be getting much-needed treatment. Lucky.
I’m bummed. I wanted to windsurf, but I won’t take the chance when I’m getting these warning twinges.
What’s happening? The same stuff that began a month before my back injury in 2008.
Basically, I’d lost 50 pounds that year via mostly cycling. With the wrong cycling posture, and with zero ab-work, the pressure on my lumbar built the entire summer. It began with excessive tightness and tension twinges. Then the shit came down and crippled me for about six weeks, affecting me for nearly a year.
To say I’m alarmed to feel ANYTHING similar is a bit of an understatement, since it was only in about Sepember 2009 that my back began to feel normal again.
Right now, everything revolves around my back. The unfortunate reality is, I don’t have extended medical, so any money that gets spent is gone for good, and I’m really not in the position to afford more than “basic maintenance” right now.
Luckily, I bought two (6)-packs of acupuncture in the hopes I’d get the money refunded from my last medical claimed. That failed and I’m out the money, but you can’t go wrong investing in health, and I still have the treatments for use.
So, it could be worse.
This morning I called and no appointments could be had. I pleaded desperately for first place on the waiting list.
Desperation, for the win! Got The Call at 1:12.
4:20 is when my road to wellness goes VrRRoom.
If I’m lucky, I’ll get cupped too. (Neat Eastern treatment that leaves one with huge welt marks but is amazing for muscle issues. OMG. I hope! My only real experience with it had me with better shoulder/neck-muscle loosening than a $90 massage would give me.)
Yep. Acupuncture. So, no windsurfing for me.
This summer is ending with a whimper, not a bang. It’s pretty anticlimatic that way, but…
It’s still a time of monumental change. Last Thursday, I submitted my application for a program I’m so wanting to get into. I got the call for a personal interview within a day. Tomorrow I go in.
Big things going down in Steffville.
We’ll see.
The back? Stupidity. Mine. I’m angry. I’m resolved. Sort of hit a mental bottom about it, because I remember how bad things got with the back and I can’t believe I’ve let myself slip to this point. I’ve been in a heady place about it yesterday and today.
The back problem’s mostly from overdoing it last week — I’d have been fine with overdoing it had I been maintaining my rehab work, like I’m supposed to, for the rest of my life. But totally have NOT been doing that. Last week? Two insane days of lifting boxes, climbing stairs, bending, etc, followed by 110km of cycling over the next few days, well… oops.
Note to Self: 40 isn’t that far away. Don’t be a dumbfuck.
Despite my freak-out at times this weekend, I’m cautiously confident this will pass pretty soon. The acupuncture appointment? Made me so damned happy. Nicely timed, my friends.
So, I kinda have missed out on the last great weekend of summer, and have had to cancel the thing I was looking forward to all summer as a personal check-point of sorts, but… it could be so much worse.
It’s a reminder, these lines we have to toe in order to keep ourselves safe, of just how important our bodies are. And balance, Grasshopper, seems the most important thing to attain for one’s body.
Stretching, a variety of exercise, posture, mindfulness — one without the others, for me, tends to be as harmful or more than not doing any at all. It’s like trying to live on only one kind of food. I could, but there’s no telling where it’ll lead.
A reminder, indeed.
A little fear of god and a very real threat of slipping back to a life of chronic pain is all one needs for motivation, if one has any brains at all.
Fortunately, I’m smart like dumptruck. Smarter, even.
So, then: Pincushion time. Yo, fix my Chi.
Tag Archives: when to stop
AIDS: Another Rant Against the Bush-League
First off, a big thank you to the cute blonde across the way who keeps wandering around in boxers and no shirt. Love those pecs. Welcome to the neighbourhood, neighbour.
Kindness… With Strings
If you attach conditions to kindness, it doesn’t seem to be so much that it’s humanitarianism you’re after, y’know?
So, it was with great amusement – albeit bitter and pissed amusement – that I took note of the sanctimonious stipulations attached to all the “donations” being made by the Bush administration since 2003 in the name of AIDS assistance throughout the world. This was all shown during the brilliant Frontline “The Age of AIDS” documentary I mentioned in an earlier posting.
When it comes to countries like Uganda and Brazil, they’ve stood face-to-face with some pretty grave dangers posed by the horrific disease, and through understanding the culture and society in their nations, they’ve managed to come up with social programs to stem the rate of infections.
In Uganda, they teach abstinence and faithfulness, but they also implore the public to use condoms. There’s an intense movement towards education, and they’ve managed to go from having one of the highest incidences of AIDS to a much more stable number (and I’m too lazy to grab facts right now). The government was providing copious free condoms for the public to use. This proved extremely effective.
In Brazil, they’re not kidding themselves. It’s a very sexual country. They work hand in hand with the sex trades to try and control the amount of unprotected sex going around, and they push condoms onto the public awareness stage. It’s working. They’ve also created a system by which their citizens are ENTITLED to the drug cocktail known to keep HIV in check (most of the time). They’ve struck deals with pharmaceutical corporations and they have in-nation drug-manufacturing plants that allow them to make drugs for their citizens at a reasonable price. This is not a wealthy nation, but they have their shit together.
The US has attached stipulations to both these nations. In Uganda, the government provision of free condoms for the masses has apparently dropped by 80% since the Bush administration intervened, favouring instead the preaching of abstinence. In Brazil, they were insisting the Brazil government condemn prostitution (as it’s legal there), which prompted the Brazilian government to say, essentially, “Fuck you” to the money so they could maintain their autonomy.
Brazil’s aggressive approach to controlling AIDS, which includes HIV treatment, massive condom distribution and explicit HIV education, has produced one of the few success stories in the developing world: In the early 1990s experts projected 1.2 million infections in Brazil by 2000, but the interventions cut that number in half.
Read the source here.
As the Brazilian government rep said to the documentary’s producers, “This year it’s prostitutes, and maybe next year it’s homosexuals. Where do you stop?”
That’s a very good question. Where do you stop?
You stop when it’s your moralizing that is limiting the potential for other nations to save the lives of their citizens. You stop when it’s your failure to realize that husbands and wives get AIDS and, thanks to their marriage vows, they should expect to be able express their love in physical terms, and telling them to abstain, and not to use a condom is something that will get you laughed out of most bedrooms. You stop when your vision is so narrow that you’re not even seeing the dangerous ramifications of your moralizing. You stop when the disease has afflicted more than 5 million people in a single year (2005). You stop when the total number of dead now exceeds 25 million in just 25 years. You stop when more than 40 million people are living with it worldwide.
You stop when your sanctimonious beliefs mean you’re being a hypocrite to the very faith you profess to believe in. It’s about saving lives. It’s about letting people live, helping people live, and, if you happen to believe in an afterlife, letting God do the judging at the end of those lives.
You just fucking stop. You help. You do whatever the fuck you can to end the deaths. Because that’s what a good person does. They help in the face of all adversity. They help when they’re called upon. They don’t put conditions on it. They don’t judge those needing help. They just help.
If, in fact, AIDS (as Pat Robertson and his ilk believe) is an epidemic unleashed by God in an effort to punish the immoral, then why has “He” given man the tools to treat it even the least little bit?
I despise hypocrisy. More importantly, I despise the knowledge that 40 million people on this planet will more than likely die from this disease that we seem unable to find a cure for, but that many of them will die far sooner than they need to, and more will contract it than are necessary, all because of to many governments who have been too ashamed to admit they need help, or those who are too fucking sanctimonious to offer help without strings.
The United States wants to be a world leader? Then fucking lead from the trenches, not the pulpits. Get in there and get dirty, and don’t worry how the fuck it looks. Be like Nike, and just do it.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I just read this, and it blows my mind. YOUTH, AGED 15-24, ACCOUNT FOR MORE THAN HALF OF ALL NEW HIV INFECTIONS WORLDWIDE. More than 6,000 are infected daily. Wear condoms, kids! Fuckin’ hell!