Changes Afoot

Parts of me are flawed

Fixing what I can

Cannot stress the rest.

Yep, these are my feet. Heinous, aren’t they?

My parents left me some very nice genetic legacies, but taking the bad along with the good I got the infamous family “Skank Toes,” a condition in which not one but two of my secondary toes are longer than my big toe, which is itself (as you will have observed) uniquely large and ugly. The result is that my feet kind of look like monkey hands, but they’re nowhere near as useful.

Even better, the odd conformation of my toes makes wearing most shoes uncomfortable, so when I’m not at work I tend to live in flip-flops. Therefore (unlike the golden glow that graces the sun-kissed backsides of my more shapely Californian sisters) my “thong tan” is on my feet. Unfortunately this tends to make my feet look dirty (they’re really not … usually) and more like hippie feet than the appendages of a 40-something-year old professional.

True, I could make more of an effort to prettify my hooves, and I do indulge in the occasional pedicure … but more often than not I have much more important things to do with $40. So there you have it. I’ve got ugly feet, and one of the best things about being my current age is being able to accept my flaws and admit some things just can’t be changed.

But that doesn’t hold true in every case. Change is indeed at work in my world, both physically and metaphysically.

First: the bod. In addition to Skank Toes, Mom and Dad passed on a tricky spine and a couple of obstreperous knees, all of which seem to require surgery on a depressingly regular basis. Tomorrow it’s knee #2, the right one, which made a funny popping sound about a month ago and has, like a challenging teenager, been refusing to do its chores ever since. So Dr. E. (“Hey, it’s you again!") is kindly going to go in with his little mini-vacuum and clean things up. I am not that nervous about this procedure as:

1) Dr. E is very good at his job and even takes little internal pictures of my joints while he’s at work to prove his mad meniscus-mending skills;

and

2) According to my father, a diabetic cancer survivor with more health problems he can shake his walker at, what I am having doesn’t even really count as surgery. He says – and he’s right – that you can’t call it “going under the knife” if all they do is stick little micro-tubey things into you.

Who can argue with that?

What I’m not looking forward to is the whole anesthesia thing. It’s bad enough when the smiling guy-or-gal in the green surgical mask saunters up and asks you to sign a piece of paper giving him-or-her permission to load you up with the same stuff that killed Michael Jackson … (“Propo-what???!!!” ). Recognizing the possibility of your own demise is unnerving at the best of times; it’s worse when you’re in a public place strapped to a gurney wearing one of those lame hospital gowns and a stranger wants you to promise that your survivors won’t sue if you don’t have enough stamina to make it through your minor little operation.

But then they actually give you the anesthetic, and next thing you know …

Well, you don’t know, and I hate that part. Being a bit of a control freak, I have a hard time letting other people load the dishwasher if I’m not supervising. Far less do I like the notion of others messing around with my body parts while I’m unconscious. Given my druthers, I would rather have my knee fixed with only a local anesthetic, so I could observe and offer constructive criticism to Dr. E. and Co. while they’re at work. (And I’m sure this is one of the many reasons my request to not go all the way under was politely declined.)

So heigh-ho, tomorrow off I go, and when I awake to the gentle sounds of the recovery-room nurse screaming at me and slapping me in the face (Why do they do that, anyway?) I will be fixed, altered, forever changed … for the better, I assume. That’s the physical part of my evolution.

Other good changes in my life include this blog, LifeKu. I started it just a month ago, and like all worthwhile endeavors it’s a work-in-progress. Thanks to some good advice, I’ve made some changes to the format and the way I post. Most notable is the fact that, going forward, if I have explanation (like this) to share with my haiku, then I will place it in the “comments” section rather than the body of the post in question. I do this on the advice of my BFF Babs, who is wicked smart and has known me since I was nine. As only a dear friend who is much more intelligent and web-savvy than I can do, Babs gently took me aside after reviewing my initial efforts and suggested I clean things up a bit.

“You do tend to go on, you know,” she said with infinite gentility and care.

Yes I do.

I love Babs.

I’m also going public, which is not something I expected to do, as LifeKu is really something I only intended to inflict on friends and family. However, as another good friend pointed out, someone as opinionated as I am really should spread the joy (pain?) around beyond my immediate circle. Hence I’m linking to one of my very own favorite local website, EdHat, which will (I am assured) open me and my seventeen-syllable takes on life up to a whole new world of readership and (I am also assured) really mean commentary called “trolling.” I actually had to look that up (as again, I am not that web-savvy) in order to realize that from now on, complete strangers can anonymously say anything they want about me with equally complete alacrity. (Dear Mama: you have the ugliest feet I have ever seen. You should be ashamed and go someplace far away where women are not allowed to write OR show their feet in public so the rest of us can live without the nightmare-inducing memories of your Skank Toes OR your horrible poetry!!!! LOL!!!!)

But that’s change for you; you take the bad along with the good and hope for the best. In the end, I guess I’m not going to worry too much because – for a good part of the next 24-hours at least – I'll be too out of it to care.

Please take care, and thanks for reading - MamaKu