PT
I have lower back pain. Whatever. For the past ten years or so, I’ve been treating it with a combination of ignoring and whining. This year, when I noticed an unappealing tendency to grunt when doing complex tasks like sitting down in a chair and getting up from a chair, I decided to whine to my primary care doc, who prescribed physical therapy.
It’s only appropriate to note that Tim had been recommending this for years. He already has a lifetime of I-told-you-sos from the time I left the overhead lights on in the van at the airport for a week, which we discovered when we flew home at midnight, so I guess a few more won’t make any difference.
Anyway, my first PT appointment was last week, and the helpful PT figured out useful things about my spine and prescribed stretches. As we’ve previously established, I suck at stretches. So this week I did stretches. Occasionally. As I headed off to my second appointment this morning, I asked Tim, “What exactly is the point of repeated PT appointments? Do they just nag you to do your stretches?” He politely suggested that this would not be a total waste of time in my case.
It turns out the point of repeated PT appointment is to give you more stretches. I now have a routine of seven stretches I’m supposed to do morning and evening, and a different routine I’m supposed to do hourly sitting at my desk. At least one of them looks like a rude physical maneuver I’ve often suggested — though not to their faces — that opposing counsel attempt.
But this whole blog post was written about what came next. The last stretch the PT taught me involved taking this:
holding it between my back and the wall, and rolling it up and down. The stretch, she explained, is called “balls on the wall.” And then I performed the most strenuous stretch of all: deploying every muscle from my dorsal spinal lumbar stomach region all the way up to my eyebrows not to snicker. And to hold this exhausting non-snicker position through the entire demonstration.
And not once — NOT ONCE — to call it what it obviously is. Yes, folks, I’ll be doing the balls-to-the-wall stretch.
Tim has a blog!
Proving definitively that I married up in the brains department, Tim has started a blog called Data Sauce. In contrast to this blog, where I make up all of the numbers out of whole cloth, Tim actually does research and supports his arguments with data.
So head on over for some excellent writing, empirically-supported arguments, and the occasional hot sauce.
Why Google + is not working
Since I’m a gmail & Google Docs user, I signed up for Google +, immediately connected with six people, and am never motivated to check it once I’ve caught up with my peeps on Facebook. Apparently neither is anyone else. So Google dug deep into its vaunted stockpile of information about me — law nerd browsing habits, clothing orders from LL Bean and Lands End, Lifehacker addiction — and sent the following email designed to lure me back to Google +:
Uh, no. Thanks. Really, I’ll pass on another time sink, this one devoted to Victoria Justice’s new favorite hat, Britney Spears, and some random dude I’ve never heard of.
Posthumous conversion
I’ve been percolating a post about religion and religious tolerance. It started around the time of Tebowmania, and each time I’d think I had just the right angle, something new and blogworthy would happen, like a panel of celibate dudes lecturing the world on contraception. That post may still occur, but this snippet (sorry!) was too good to wait:
Stephen Colbert on Thursday tackled the practice of posthumously baptizing Holocaust victims into the Mormon church. . . . But “Jews don’t baptize, so instead I will now proxy-circumcise all the dead Mormons,” Colbert said.
The practice of posthumous baptism is fascinating to me from a number of angles. Given that Jews don’t believe that baptism has any significance, our collective response should logically be “knock yourselves out, guys. Enjoy the swim.” But for sheer creepiness, it is really hard to outdo. If I got word that my Jewish ancestors were being, well, not “baptized,” because that is not a meaningful concept to me, but invoked during a Mormon pool party the upshot of which is to say that their religion is better than mine, I’d be good and annoyed. And creeped out.
Stephen Colbert has the answer. Posthumous conversion of Mormons to Jews!
(I couldn’t get the Comedy Central video clip to embed, and I’ve wasted just about enough jury-instruction-drafting time trying. For the full, hilarious, clip, click here.)
I’m thinking of proxy converting everyone, living or dead, to my religion: Unaffiliated Skeptic With A Working Hypothesis of Monotheism. Our main sacrament is Trying to Figure Out What It All Means. All of my new converts would wander around in the same state of religious confusion in which I dwell, engaging in the Sacrament by asking each other, “What do you think it all means?” and listening respectfully to the answer. No special clothing or food required. And most importantly, no oppressing, killing, or even legislating against anyone else’s faith.
“Sh*t people say” jumps the shark.
Shit people say to spouses of people who use wheelchairs:
My favorite “I”m so sorry” experience was in my first trial as a young lawyer, when Tim — who was an associate at the same fancy-pants DC law firm that I was — came to watch. On a break, our loathsome opposing counsel came up to me and said, out of the blue, “I’m so sorry.” Given the quantity of serious litigation bullshit he had engaged in, I was glad he saw fit to apologize, but thought it was better directed to the senior partner. I was starting to say something about that when he added, “about your husband…” Honestly, I still didn’t understand: Tim wasn’t assigned to the case; what could this dude possibly mean? He had to stumble on to say something about “injury” and “wheelchair” before it finally dawned on me. Needless to say, I was speechless.
Years later, I actually wrote and submitted a “Modern Love” column to the New York Times after some lady walked up to us at a baseball game and said something about me being a good caretaker. How can you explain in a sentence how ordinary life is? How care is given and taken in equal measure? Unfortunately, my column couldn’t compete with other important dispatches from the front lines of human relationships, for example, looking for a date on Craigslist or overthinking your boyfriend’s slippers.
That’s the great thing about the blog: the only thing standing between my thoughts and publication is my own good judgment. Such as it is.
Lactation: I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
Though what this judge thought it meant is beyond me. The awesome Barry Roseman posts a quote of the day for a bunch of us civil rights lawyer types. Here was today’s:
The commission says that the company fired [Donnica Venters] because she wanted to pump breast-milk. Discrimination because of pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical discrimination is unlawful. Related conditions can include cramping, dizziness, and nausea while pregnant.
Even if the company’s claim that she was fired for abandonment is meant to hide the real reason — she was wanted to pump breast-milk — lactation is not pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition. She gave birth on December 11, 2009. After that day, she was no longer pregnant and her pregnancy-related conditions ended.
Firing someone because of lactation or breast-pumping is not sex discrimination.*
Hold on. You may have missed the last line, so I’ll re-WordPress-special-quote-function it:
Firing someone because of lactation or breast-pumping is not sex discrimination.
Makes total sense: none of the men were permitted to lactate or pump breast milk at work either. QED!
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* EEOC v. Housing Funding II, Ltd., 11-cv-02442 (S.D. Tex. Feb. 2, 2012), slip op. at 2.
Yes, we have a voting problem, Part Deux
Just last month I was being cynical about Republican efforts to prevent voting fraud by making sure that students and poor people don’t vote. But thank goodness the Republicans are on the ball, so we could catch poor student Charlie White and punish him for his voting transgressions.
Oh. Wait.
Jury finds Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White guilty on 6 of 7 felony charges
Do you love that his name is Charlie White as much as I do? And it’s really a Republican hypocrisy two-fer, because it turned out that his vote fraud, er, “confusion” was, well, I’ll let IndyStar.com break it to you gently:
The charges stemmed from confusion over where White lived when he campaigned for secretary of state in late 2009 and 2010. White claimed that he lived at his ex-wife’s home on the east side of Fishers. But the jury convicted him based on allegations that he actually lived in a townhouse on the opposite side of town that he bought for him and his then-fiancé. The townhouse was outside his Fishers Town Council district.
Note that it’s “confusion” when a conservative politician bails on his wife, shacks up with his fiancé, and fails to notify the secretary of state so he can stay on the city council of the city in which he no longer lives, but potential “fraud” when an 84-year-old woman who has voted in every election since 1948 doesn’t have a birth certificate because she was born at home in 1927.
Wishful thinking/reality
What I bought online this week:
What it looks like out my back door:
Why are some atheists such a**holes?
Right, because making fun of other people’s beliefs has done so much — throughout history — to promote peace and understanding.
How about “Choose Mutual Respect: It Will Be Better for All of Us.”
Twitter: @AmyFarr
