Still squatting; stopped counting

My ridiculously severe neck injury pretty much put an end to my 100-squats-a-day experiment, so I have nothing too exciting to report about it. On the plus side, I learned something from the attempt: The little bits of exercise you can squeeze into a busy day—like while you're waiting for the kettle to boil—do count for something. Which is nice to know if you're someone like me, who might go a week without stepping outdoors, let alone going to the gym, during a freelance work tornado.

The other interesting thing I learned is that trying to count 100 of something over the course of a day is annoying and makes me neurotic. So I still do squats now when I feel like it, but I don't try to count them. I'm sure it doesn't add up to 100 most days, but as a wise man once told me (it was Dan the Physical Therapist): "Muscles can't count."

What a revelation. Since the Ironman I've been trying to let go of tracking and quantifying and recording everything I do—although so far it's been impossible to turn off my mental swim yardage counter—but I had not really thought of not even counting the number of reps you do while lifting weight. It makes sense, though. There's nothing magical about "10."

P.S. I have a new "Use it (or lose it)" experiment to tell you about next time. Teaser!

Recovering

I graduated from physical therapy last Friday, and today my neck feels almost like a completely normal, functioning neck again. (I believe, for example, that if someone sneaked up behind me and banged two frying pans together just over my right shoulder, I could react without causing myself pain. But just to be safe, don't try it.) The plan is to go back to Dan in a couple of weeks and get a diagnosis and plan of action for healing my shoulder. Until then, I'm supposed to just take it easy and try not to break any other body parts.

It hasn't been too hard to not get any physical activity, though, because on Thursday morning I got an email from Happy letting me know that his next 900-page book was supposed to go to press in less than a week, and could I please proof, cross-reference, and index it by Monday morning, kthanksbye? So I rallied some subcontracting troops and made that happen (thus ensuring that next time we will get only three days to do the work), but I haven't been out of my desk chair for four days straight. 

The path to neck recovery was laid out pretty clearly to me, but I keep forgetting how it is you're supposed to recover from your brain being broken by a work marathon. Something like, "It's okay to sit and stare a lot, and don't expect too much of yourself for a couple of days?"

A critique of the modern "cake smash"

A blog I normally enjoy is running a contest that I find so irritating I can hardly stand it. I thought about making a critical comment on the blog itself, but that's obnoxious. I thought about tweeting (apparently I'm doing that again) something witty and cutting, but there was no way to explain myself in 140 characters. And I also considered a Facebook post, but I'm trying not to drive my casual acquaintances away with over-frequent rants about nutrition.

(Wait, don't you go away! It's only loosely* tied to nutrition, I promise!)

Finally, I considered not saying anything about it to anyone at all ever, and I don't really have any good reason for not doing that except what are personal blogs with limited readership for, anyway?

The irritation is a photo contest for the "best cake smash"—you know, the picture you get when you put a piece of birthday cake in front of a 1-year-old and let them "eat" it as best they can. I do get that it's really cute when they get cake on their faces. (It's not cute on brides, though, so I still don't understand that.)

But judging from the entries in the contest, the modern cake smash is a major photo op that requires everyone involved to go insane. Here's what I learned from looking at the contest entries on Facebook:

1. There is a big trade in professional photographs of 1-year-olds with cake on their faces (just Google "cake smash" and look). Boys go shirtless but wear oversized neckware, girls also go shirtless but get giant hair ribbons, and the frosting color MUST coordinate with the diaper/tutu color.
2. In the interest (I guess) of getting better photos, people are putting huge amounts of cake in front of their babies for them to destroy. Full-sized, professional-bakery cakes! The kind with fancy lettering that cost money! Go ahead and dive right in, little Brayden!
3. Finally, I wondered why so many of the children were crying in their cake-smash pictures. At first I reasoned that they might just be overstimulated, or startled by the singing of "Happy Birthday." But then I started reading the comments on the photos, and the people were laughing about how little Emma didn't much like it when her mommy SMASHED LITTLE EMMA'S FACE IN THE CAKE. (Ha ha ha! I wonder why not!) 

So, this is my own little forum and I'm going to go ahead and say it: Gluten, sugar, and chemical-filled frosting for 1-year-olds are stupid, but they are the least of our worries when there are dangerous lunatics like this on the loose raising children.

* I'm actually going to mostly set aside the nutritional aspects of giving cake to a 1-year-old because I already know how that battle goes. And someone in the Facebook comments already posted that she was "sad" to see all the babies eating "legalized cocaine," and she got RIPPED TO SHREDS by the other mommies. Too bad for the entire mommy universe that they're wrong and she's right.

All the updates

My neck feels much, much better, but I'm continuing physical therapy anyway. It's still pretty tender, and Dan the Physical Therapist thinks there are a couple of underlying problems contributing to both my shoulder pain and my neck pain. I can't wait to be cured and never wake up with a sore neck again. (Plus I like getting a therapeutic massage every of my life; I won't lie.)

I also can't wait to get back to yoga. And "the squat project." But in case for some reason I never do get back to it, here's been my takeaway so far: If you do 100 air squats a day — 10 at a time whenever you happen to think about it — you can achieve a whole lot of goodness with no sweat, no equipment, and not too much effort. That will be nice to remember when work gets busy again, which should be, oh, tomorrowish.

And speaking of work, I seriously love my new job with Sneezy. There are a few minor frustrations to iron out, but the work itself is tremendously fun, and I get to write headlines again, which brings me so much joy. I may even get to write articles at some point down the road, which I would love. It's also nice to have a couple of hours of guaranteed work every weekday, so that even if nothing else happens to be going on, at least I feel like my family won't starve.

Was that all the updates? I think that was all the updates.

A very good idea

I've had nagging shoulder pain for going on seven months now, dating back to when I played softball this summer. So I've been thinking about physical therapy a lot, but only in a vague way, like, "Gee, I really should go get this dealt with sometime in the indeterminate future." I don't know why seven months of pain is preferable to just doing the few simple things that start the Ball of Complete Cure rolling, but there it is. In fact, when I mentioned my shoulder pain to my dad, he told me he's had a similar shoulder problem that's been bothering him for years, so I guess it's genetic (the stupidity, not the shoulder).

Anyway, it's a measure of how much my neck hurt yesterday that I actually faced my irrational fears of both the health insurance industry and the telephone and called a physical therapist. You remember Dan, the brutal but scarily effective PT, right? He said he wouldn't be surprised if my neck issue was related to my shoulder issue, but he didn't want to even touch the shoulder until we'd dealt with the immediate problem. Fine with me. My shoulder "pain" was a mosquito bite compared with what was happening in my neck.

He ran some kind of electrical current/therapeutic ultrasound through me to relax the muscles, did some manipulation and massage, taught me how to make a cervical collar out of a pillowcase, gave me a simple neck-turning exercise to do several times a day, and had me switch to a flatter pillow. Bam. I'm not completely cured yet (got another session later today), but I slept very well, I'm not on Advil anymore, and I'm functioning to the point of considering going to yoga—although I decided against it, because Not Being Stupid seems like something fun to try this week.

Incapacitated

At 6:15 this morning, I flopped over in bed, turned my head to the right, set it down on the pillow…and felt a wave of burning stretch from my right shoulder to my right ear. What the heck? I wondered at first if I was having a stroke or something, but within fifteen minutes it had turned into the typical soreness of "slept funny on my neck"—only about ten times worse.

Among other things, I'm annoyed because my gym has finally added some good evening yoga classes, and I really wanted to go one tonight. But since the list of things that hurts includes "turning my head 5 degrees to the right," "leaning forward," "the impact of walking down stairs," and "opening my mouth," I think I'd better play it safe. Or maybe check myself into a hospital.

My husband kindly pointed out that, ironically, if I'd just gone to the 5:15 a.m. yoga like I used to, this never would have happened. Har har.

Deeds

Part of my intention with the "Use it (or lose it)" theme for the year was to take my good intentions, which I always have a lot of, and to actually use them by doing nice things for other people, which I don't do nearly as often. (See how conveniently the theme can be massaged to mean anything I want?)

So last week I said to myself, "Self, the first opportunity you get to do a favor for someone, don't even think about—just do it." Not ten minutes later, an acquaintance asked on Facebook if anyone had any extra boxes, because her daughter was moving in a hurry and was in desperate need. Well, we have tons of big boxes in the garage from all the grass-fed meat I buy online. I figured that offering to deliver them would improve the good-deediness of the gesture—but only slightly, because the house turned out to be about three blocks from where Mik has swim practice.

The very next day, the same Facebook friend put out a request for old winter coats—her husband had learned that there were some kids at a nearby elementary school who didn't have any. I just laughed—you mean like this big pile of outgrown coats already in the donate pile?—and arranged another swim-practice-hour delivery.

What a humanitarian I am, using good deeds as a way to conveniently clean my house!