captain morgan

If I stand at my dresser with my "bad" leg propped up on the open drawer and the laptop aloft on it’s stand I am ergonomically neutral and capable of writing without straining anything in my body. I switch to standing on my "bad" leg for periods just to make sure that I’m giving it some usage. It’s already a little thinner from the previous herniation. Nerve compression leads to muscle wasting, etc. I look like a Captain Morgan ad. A painful one.

I’m going in for my second selective nerve block tomorrow. I’m not sure why it’s not a steroid epidural. I should ask. I always have ten million questions. Ten million more.
From what I’ve been able to figure out, this is all about getting the right physical therapy in the right order with the right nutrition and the right pain management. I can expect partial or complete resolution within a year.
D’s in the other room trying to get Angry Birds to work on his phone but they want so much fucking information for him just to play the game and he’s really bad at the whole "reading and answering questions" thing so computers are pretty much his nightmare scenario all the time. I always say to him, "use your eyes" but it’s a little mean because he’s dyslexic. Plus they’re so pushy about what they want. Why do they need his apple ID for him to play Angry Birds? WTF?
My cousin and her daughter were in town for the Eukanuba Dog show. She came and visited with me for about four hours. We talked about all kinds of stuff. She said "oh, you’ve got the Urban back." Her dad had a herniated disc — had to wear a corset and was addicted to pain killers. Great. Anyhow, he died in a plane crash when I was eleven or twelve. It was quite traumatic, naturally because her brother and mother were on board as well — so she was orphaned at 21. She’s very direct — I imagine that kind of life change would make one a very straightforward person. She also once helped a Czech pen pal defect to the US but that’s a story for another day.
I’m almost done with the big rewrite of the "Untitled David Duchovny Project." It’s been kind of a nightmare. It was like, "we love it, we love it — just change this one thing." And then I did and they were like "this is great! We’re almost there! Now just change this one thing…" and I did and they were like, "We hate it. Not only do we not like what you changed, we don’t like what we used to like." And I was like, what the fuck just happened here? After months of scratching my head I finally figured it all out. It took some work but I got them to tell me, in writing, exactly what they wanted me to change and that’s exactly what I’m doing. I have to admit, the changes they want are not bad — the problem between draft 2 and 3 that made it go off the rails is they were not being specific and they also realized that the more I rewrote David’s script the less it sounded like David’s voice. Well duh. This draft has been about fixing exactly what they want fixed and restoring huge chunks of David’s original script. He’s not a bad writer — he’s got great character stuff it’s just that his structure was a mess and there were some logic issues that got dropped. Actors know character backwards and forwards and when they write, they tend to write with an emotional intensity that leaps off the page. David’s very much this kind of writer. It’s just that the plot got complex when it needed to be simple. I also have a slightly less broad sense of humor than David — so I kept toning down jokes that felt kooky to me. In the end, though, that was a mistake. The kooky stuff was chemistry — just a type of chemistry I didn’t quite get. But David wrote this for himself to play the lead — it’s reasonable to trust that he can pull it off.
It’s so odd how communications can break down so easily. I think, too, I get in my own way. I can’t always hear what people are shouting at me. Like before I had surgery on 9/23 (bad numbers) and D kept sending me links to people who had dealt with herniated discs non-surgically. Even the psychic who married us was begging me to give alternatives a try. But I thought, "nope, 95%, that’s good enough for me!"
I just have one more class this semester and then I have a whole month off! Ke-ripes I hope I’m feeling a little more normal once the Spring semester starts.