Self-image

I am, it seems, starting to internalise having a broken ankle. Some of my dreams have been slightly stilted, as if I don't quite know where my feet are.

This morning, I was having dreams about getting the cast off (which is supposed to happen tomorrow). I didn't, of course, get it removed, something always seemed to be keeping it from happening. It was some very pretty dreaming, lots of people, and places and spaces. Every so often I would be aware of having taken a stride on my right foot; in the cast. It wasn't bad (it actually felt pretty good), but I knew it was something I ought not be doing.

In the waking world, I have, pretty much, come to terms with being less easily mobile (though the bus bottleneck back home is a lot more frustrating when getting to the stop is so much more work, and waiting at a stop with no benches really suitable for someone who isn't in a cast for roughly an hour is enough to make one a bit more radical in one's views on functional, and accessible public transit).

More time is required to do everything. Carrying things is work. I have, joy of joys, managed to not (touch wood) break anything in the act of trying to be self-sufficient.

Right now my ankle hurts because I decided to prune the grape Merav and I repotted. Cleaning up the tools (my bonsai shears, nippers and ball cutter) was not so onerous. The joys of a Dremel and some cloth wheels), but the actual moving about to look at the way the thing had grown, and how I want it to grow, and how it looked, and how I think it will look in leaf, etc., that was a pain. Moving myself, so I could use the tools, that was a different sort of pain.

I also decided to take some pictures, which was a lot more work than it would normally be. I can't stand, stoop, squat, nor any other thing I might normally. I can kneel. So I took my studio tripod (it's the heaviest, and the one with the greatest ability to adjust).

I couldn't really have taken it outside three weeks ago. The knack of using one crutch while pinning the other to my body and carrying something in my hand was solid, but the tripod is too heavy for that to be a really good idea. To much chance of a failure of balance. I've gotten good enough to carry the tripod, and use both crutches.

But taking about a dozen pictures (and about 80 frames), took about an hour.

Cooking takes a bit of planning. The kneelchair makes things easier, but I still have to plan things as simple as making toast (the big knife I use for cutting bread is interesting to watch a guy hoping with a crutch carry across the room).

The ankle feels oddly tight, or full, or something. If I wiggle it, just so, in the cast it feels as if the skin is being stretched. I don't know if I managed to shift something in the fall I took last Saturday, or if this is just normal. I am, of course, hoping for a verdict of, "just normal."

The thought, at this removed, that it might be screwed up, and need to be cut into to fix... doesn't really bear thinking on. So, with luck, tomorrow evening I will be sitting n the hot tub, letting my ankle rotate in ways it's not moved in about a month.

It's hard to credit, but it's been four weeks as of tomorrow since I last took a step. At least another two weeks until I get to do it again,I think. I sure as hell don't plan to rush this aspect of things. Muscle work sure. Push that for all I'm worth. Bone restructuring... I intend to be conservative as all get out.

Oi...

I'm reading Richard Cohen's, "Chasing the Sun". It's a decent book, so far, about the cultural aspects of the sun. It's got some good writing, but every so often there are some real howlers:

In India and Africa the lion and the tiger are solar animals. Sunrise being represented by a young lion, noon by one in its prime, and sunset by one in its old age. Where lions are absent, local communities adapt: in the pre-Conquest Americas, the eagle and the jaguar are the chosen beasts.

In the book it's across two pages. So the badness of it is perhaps differently apparent. Either India and Africa ought to swap, or the lions and tigers ought to, to keep the order of the pairs in synch.

But that's not such a big deal. I'd also have liked to see something which talks about tigers in relation to the sun, since he made a point of bringing them up.

But the bit about lions and "Africa" is in need of some work too. Africa is a BIG place. I'll bet that set of images he tosses out so blithely as, "the way things are," is tolerably localised.

And then we turn the page and see that in the absence of lions the "local communities adapt..."

WTF? The Lion is some sort of primeval archetype... burned into the collective unconscious to the point that those who don't live near them have to, "adapt,"?

There haven't been too many howlers like that, and there have been some really good points about how what one interprets about something like Stonehenge, or the Pyramids, etc. may perhaps say a lot more about the observer than the observed, but sheesh... had he no editor?