Wow another beautiful day in paradise. You know, I don’t know if any of you ever pictured your life as being a movie sometime, but on my long distance journey from my car to my office building, I got to thinking what my life would look like if the cameras were roiling at that very moment. And for those of you who are reading this and wondering…..no I do not do any kind of recreational drugs!! lol I have no idea why this thought popped in my head, but it was there and I could not shake it. I bet that at this point in time, if my life was a movie, it would probably be directed by Spike Lee. If you have ever seen a Spike Lee movie and paid attention to the scenes where either one person or two people are walking and talking you would know what I mean. In these scenes the camera looks almost as if the person walking is holding the camera in their hands and pointing it up toward themselves. During these scenes, the people are usually “acting” like they are walking, so they over exaggerate the smallest motions to sale you on the fact that they are “walking,” kind of like scenes where people act like they are driving so they constantly adjust the steering wheel even though the scenery behind them stays straight. And with this crazy CAM boot on, my up and down bounce is heavily exaggerated.
With Halloween being around the corner I think I may be able to use this thing to my advantage and make some extra money to cover the medical bills. I happened to be up late Friday night and while walking to my bedroom, I could not help but pay attention to the pronounced THUD sound I would make every other step, so to me it sounded like some huge one legged creature traveling across a dark room. So perhaps I will rent my bad appendage out to a local haunted house and just spend my day walking back and forth in a dark hall for sound effects. If I get board, I can throw the crutches on for an added effect. Then I will sound like a huge one legged creature walking across a dark room….in a walker…okay, not scary, but I’m still working on it.
I am not sure how many people may be familiar with the Wizard of Ox movie, where a guy gets caught pulling levers and speaking into a microphone connected to a giant robot that all the people in the land fear and see as a god. But when he gets caught his quotes this now often used phrase, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Well, I thought of this after taking note of some peculiar activity I have been noticing as of late. I have noticed that as I walk back and forth from one area to another, people cannot help but look at the CAM boot. Okay, it’s not what most would consider “normal” unless you work in an orthopedics office, I get that. But it’s the way people go about looking. Some people may calmly look down and back up in a circular motion, as if their head was on some sort of over greased swivel. Others, mostly women, will look down at the boot and when I look at them, they sheepishly look away as if they were ashamed because they were staring or something and it gets pretty awkward. If you can’t picture that picture this; imagine you are in a gym on a treadmill, never mind you ATR right now, FOCUS. As you walk on this treadmill you see a petite sheepish little woman approaching this weird looking guy with chili pepper red spandex shorts on, with an awkward bulge in the front walking toward her. Now imagine that as she approaches him, she first glances at his mullet and then cannot help but notice the crazy colored shorts. But just as she begins to look away, she notices the bulge and does a double take before she even realized she was doing it. Now imagine her looking up at this guys face and noticing he had been looking at her face the whole time. Okay, so you may say, wow, what’s so uncomfortable about that? Take a moment and imagine her having to ride an elevator with him. loll
I swear this is what it is like every day. I always catch somebody looking (at my CAM boot. lol ), and now I think it’s funny to catch them looking! Speaking of getting caught looking, I am sure that everyone reading this has noticed that it is not a good idea to look back at the cute girl or guy that just passed you by like you used to before the crutches. That episode usually ends up in you getting your crutches all crooked and making a bunch of noise, almost falling and most likely getting caught looking. Nuff said. NEXT. By the way, this did not happen to me but a fellow crutch bound fellow at my job. I was there to witness the whole thing and I did not stop laughing for a good 20 minutes.
Now, I am probably to hardest person to offend by way of calling me a name of telling an off color joke, but I have noticed something. A lot of the people that know me call me names like handicap, crip, cripple, hop along, big FOOT, Boot legger, and many other names. But it got me to wondering what actually makes this okay? I mean, is it okay because it’s just a temporary condition therefore it is socially acceptable to call me that? I wonder if, God forbid, something worse happened to me and I had some short term brain damage, if these same people would say stuff like, “Hey, what’s up retard!” So perhaps it is just because it is a temporary situation that makes it okay, I can accept that. But I wonder if the people who say it know why it is socially acceptable. To test this theory I have started a new ……study, if you will. The people under me who are calling me Handyman, or Cripple, etc, I have started calling them employed. I am wondering who the first person will be that gets the clue! This would be a joke of course.
Hey one more thing before I go, have you ever met someone who is really open, maybe a little bit too open in their conversation? I tend to attract a lot of those people. I guess that could be because I am one of…those people, duhhh. So I was speaking with this young lady my first day back to the job, and I was complaining about not being able to go to the gym, and losing weight and so on. Well in order to make me feel better she started describing all the different excursuses I could do while sitting down that would not put any pressure on my leg. So she started going on and on, and I mean literally she is one of those people who can talk to you so long they make you feel as if you can literally fall asleep standing up while listening to them. I tend to attract a lot of those people because, aw hell, I’m one of them. Anyway, as she was telling me about sit-ups, and curls and blah blah blah, not realizing that I used to be a trainer, I heard her throw in an exercise that I know I had heard before and could not remember what it was, but I was afraid to ask any questions that would have forced her to talk any more than she already was. Literally, I was concentrating as hard as I could to see if I could make my phone ring so I could excuse myself from the conversation, but any way, the exercise she said was a Kegel exercise. At the time it echoed in my head and all of her other words became, “wank wah wahh wa wank,” and all I could think of was, where I have heard that. So after she left I looked it up. Wow, when I googled it and found out what a Kegel exercise was, all I could think about was WTF? You don’t recommend exercises like that to people you barely know, what an odd bird she was. Long story short, after doing those exercises for 3 weeks now, the results have been GREAT! lol
Have a great day