While I was home for Christmas and
New Year's, I was steadfast in my resolve to not resolve. Not only is New
Year's Eve my least favorite holiday, but I also don't really believe in making
resolutions as a way to celebrate a new year.
That doesn't mean I don't get
it. The whole shebang makes a lot of sense to me. People want to
shake off the baggage of the past year, and they can ceremoniously dispense
with less than stellar happenings as the year turns over. January 1, a
whole year ripe with promise. A year we haven't screwed up yet!
Maybe this sounds a little cynical. It’s probably my dislike for the holiday
bleeding its way through. I just don’t
think that any resolution that you have to wait for an “occasion” to make is
probably going to stick.
So there I was, sitting on the
soon-to-not-be nude colored countertops in the kitchen, talking to Mom about
ceremonial resolutions and how I had none to make. Jon told me a funny little snippet of a story
– you know, without any of the contextual bits, so you will just have to
imagine a little stick figure person – wherein the subject makes a New Year’s
resolution to make only one resolution.
Bam.
The recursive resolution appealed
to me, because there was really no way to accidentally break it, and it would
be fairly difficult to fall off the one-and-done wagon.
Maybe one-and-done isn’t really an
appropriate turn of phrase, but I think it works well here.
Mom suggested that she might resolve
to blog more regularly. In digestible
bits, because she firmly believes, having read a statistic somewhere that is
most probably true (it only makes sense), that people tend to like smaller blog
entries. 300 to 800 words, maximum, I
think it was, although now that I think of it, I can’t remember.
So she settled on 500 words a day,
but then she thought she had better allow for the Sabbath and it might be nice
to have another day off, so it is an approximately (no less than) 5 days of 500
word blog entries per week. Of course,
you can make up for it if need be, but it turns out that 500 words is a pretty
substantial number and it might be tough to find enough wonder among the
monotonous days to hit 1000 to make up for a missed day,
Then again, college application
essays were usually about 1000 words.
For all the difficulty we find in trying to write nice things about
ourselves to make other people want us, that benchmark usually comes all too
soon.
Anyway, I thought it sounded kind
of nice, being woefully out of touch with my blogging in recent (and not so
recent) years. So I committed to try for
the month of January with her, and here I am making up for our lost time.
We didn’t make our resolution on
January 1. Cut us a break!
Then again, it is only January 5
today, and only January 1-3 were actually week days, so I figure if I want to
try to catch up on my lost time, I only have to write 1500 words tonight. We will see how many words I have in me.
Let me talk a little bit about New
Haven. I am not sure why it is, because
to the best of my knowledge, New Haven has been in the northeast as long as it
has existed, but New Haven is really awful at snow removal.
I occasionally pride myself on
being able to drive well in the snow. I
think it has a lot to do with being able to keep my cool while everyone else
kind of flails. But if it snows any
substantial amount, my little Elantra is staying put. Because I pay the insurance on that baby, and
I know the deal.
The roads get slick, the hills get
treacherous, the other drivers get timid, the plows push the snow around but no
one actually deals with the frozen stuff on the roads. It sometimes feels like I’ve been pushed into
some weird post-apocalyptic society where salt is unknown.
When they do salt, they just pour
it in one place on the sidewalk and move on, leaving a small salt
mountain. But this is rare, so it is
almost appreciated when one stumbles upon the rare salt hill.
Why am I talking about this?
I will tell you why.
Today, I fell down twelve concrete
stairs and landed in an ungainly heap on the sidewalk below. I really feel that stairs should be
salted. I was heading out to meet some
friends for a late lunch and I decided to walk rather than risk trying to park
on the pitifully plowed streets of New Haven.
As I was heading out down the path
to the stairs to the street, I was doing a quick check for the trifecta, as DJ
calls it: wallet, cell phone, keys. As I
stepped down onto the first step, I immediately felt my foot slide right out
from under me, but instead of falling flat on my behind (which now that I think
of it, I’m not entirely sure why that didn’t happen but I think my tailbone is
thanking me), I went forward. I reached
desperately for the railing and I can’t remember whether my hand slipped off of
it or whether I missed entirely.
That is also lucky, because I
suspect if I’d actually had some purchase with my hand on the railing, I’d
probably have broken a wrist or dislocated something in my arm.
However, I didn’t feel lucky as I
hung suspended over a set of very solid, very icy concrete stairs. The thought almost lazily crossed my mind as
I was crashing to earth – maybe this is the time for me to break my first bone –
and then I bounced once and landed on my shoulder. It is all very much a gray, slushy blur in my
memory.
An explosion of pain shot through
my left thigh and I dimly wondered if I’d managed to snap something in there,
wondered if a wall of adrenaline was keeping me from feeling the worst of the
pain. I had snow and dirt in my hair,
minor scrapes up my left arm, two throbbing knees and I wasn’t sure if I’d be
able to stand on my left leg.
I looked around and no one had seen
and I, ever the pragmatist, was relieved.
Not my most graceful moment, but I know it wasn’t my fault that it happened. I finally pulled myself to a knee and then
put some weight gingerly on my left leg as a few cars drove past. It held, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t
broken. In fact, the pain only intensified
when I moved it, not when I put weight on it.
Probably a muscle injury! I
thought. I can think this because my
brother is going to be a doctor.
A car slowed to a stop as I was
attempting to walk down the equally icy, fairly sharply sloped sidewalk on
Canner. The reverse lights came on, and
she backed up enough that I could see her clearly through her open passenger
side window. She was a middle-aged
African American woman with a concerned face, and she asked me if I was all
right.
I tried not to pause too long to
consider. “Oh, yes, I’m okay. I’ll be all right.”
“You’re sure?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’ll be all right.” I
repeated, and she slowly drove away.
I realized that there was no way
that I was going to make it down this slip-n-slide of a sidewalk, with or
without a really epic bruise on my thigh that is just waiting to surface. As she drove off, I entered the snow bank to
make my way to the road. One careful
step, one more (ouch), and on the third my foot slipped out from under me and I
went down again. On my back, this time,
and into snow, so it was wet and embarrassing, but not painful.
I slipped the rest of the way to
the restaurant, jarred by pain every time a step wasn’t as true as I expected,
but I was careful and stayed upright for the rest of the journey.
My feelings on the matter are as
follows: if New Haven can’t be bothered to salt the stairs and sidewalks, they
might as well not shovel them. Sets of
icy stairs and sidewalks are far more dangerous than snowy stairs and
sidewalks, and no easier to travel. At
least if you fall in snow, you probably won’t damage yourself.
I maybe ought to call Yale and let
them know that this is dangerous. I hate
calling people and I don’t really want to talk about how I fell to
someone. But, you know. I could sue them, but they’re already
covering my medical costs so there’s not really much point.
I have two scraped up knees that
look pretty bad, but I am mostly excited for the bruise on my thigh to surface
because it is going to be amazing. I am
in so much pain.
I have taken some advil and I am
going to go to bed now. I have successfully
written just over 1500 words.
See you tomorrow.
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