November 18, 2002
finger food
In other cheering news of the day, I appear to have fractured a finger.
My middle finger no less, and how I managed to do that I have no notion. I woke up one morning, found my arm under a pillow, and moved it. I said, "Ow." And that was it.
I'm baffled as to how, of all the fingers to be injured, my middle would be the one to step up to the occasion. I rarely use my middle finger, something that sets me apart from most Asians and New Yorkers. Asians use it to point with, not at all rudely, a habit I've tried in vain to persuade my mother to break.
Me: "Mom, please don't do that."
Mom: "Hm?"
Me: "Your middle finger. Please don't use that one. It's rude."
Mom: (peering at her middle finger) "Why this one rude?" (She waves it in the air.) "What does it do so rude?"
Me: "It's just ... rude. In the United States. It's not considered polite."
Mom: "Why?"
Me: "I ... it doesn't matter. It's just rude."
Mom: (interested) "Is it because of sex? Do Americans use this finger?" (She waves it again, experimentally.)
Me: "Oh my GOD."
New Yorkers, of course, use the finger for a completely different reason, which doesn't need to be mentioned here. But it does go to illustrate that I, who am neither a New Yorker nor -- well, I am Asian, but not a middle-finger-pointing asian, should suddenly fracture her middle finger.
No idea what to do next. Do I call my doctor? What would he do? Tell me my finger is fractured? Would he put it in a little splint? Will I have to worry about waving to drivers that let me cut in in front of them, lest they misunderstand the bulbous finger that gets waved at them and end up inflamed with road rage?
I tucked my finger back into my denial pocket and went on with my life. Two days later, I played a reluctant gig for a friend of my mother's: 3 hours pounding on the piano, more than I've played over the entire year and a half. The next day, I woke up to discover the finger was beginning to bruise. I poked it for a few minutes out of sheer curiosity -- ow, ow, not ow, OW -- and discovered just what I couldn't use it for.
I think I've mentioned before that I have a rather disassociative approach to my body. Lately, my relationship with my finger has rapidly deteriorated. It has taken on the enormity of a third party appendage, complete with its own malevolent personality and capitalized first letter. Somehow, in the casting of various body parts, the Finger was given the role of the enemy. I find myself doing things to spite the Finger or inflict pain on the Finger -- childish, I know -- and somehow never quite remember until it's too late that the Finger actually sends its "pain received!" messages up to my brain.
Sometimes I think about the Darwin Awards and worry that they're reserving a spot in their database just for me. "Don't worry," the editors are saying to each other. "She'll be along any time now."
Tonight is the Leonid showers, which excites me no end. Before, back in the day, I used to get excited about little things like dinner and television programs and, okay, kleenex. Nowadays it takes a celestial conflagration and tens of thousands of pieces of debris raining fire down on earth. Step back, boys. I'm hitting the big time.
In the meantime, the Guy and I have been struggling to make some sense of all the diabetes information we've fished out of the internet, and corrected our lifestyles accordingly. Kaiser was kind enough to send me a lab report -- no ketones, and it's confirmed that I'm Type II -- together with an informational brochure. However, I've yet to find any comprehensive "This is what you do now" manual anywhere, so life has continued to be a very clumsy collage of adjustments, sliced up with left-handed scissors and pasted together with Elmer's.
(Side comment: the cow on Elmer's glue has always disturbed me. He looks far too cheery for a cow, a uniformly morose species that finds little about life that delights and stimulates once they learn they're doomed to a lifetime diet of grass. I can't explain its presence on the label, and have an uneasy feeling it might have something to do with the glue contents. In my optimistic youth, I speculated that there was cow's milk involved in the making of Elmer's. Now, a few decades later, I start to have, shall we say, concerns. Doubts. Worries. Especially considering the amount of glue that I and my classmates consumed -- literally -- in our youth. Is ignorance really bliss?)
My friends are making adjustments as well, which makes me grateful that I have them. Tara, back from an international jaunt that encompassed New Jersey and Germany, in that order, called to invite me to dinner tomorrow. She wanted to know my new dietary requirements, and I was forced to admit I didn't really know for sure.
"No fried foods, stay away from carbs, limited sugar...healthy foods," I said at last, vaguely. And that's all I can do for myself, too.
Yesterday afternoon, the Guy and I went by Best Buy to replace my cell phone headset and car charger. While I drifted through the stacks of PC games, none of which I could rationalize with my credit card, the Guy scrounged about in the Playstation section and came bounding out with a look of smug triumph. Ever since I was diagnosed, the Guy has been fixated on getting me to exercise. Every internet source informed him that exercise and weight loss were vital to controlling diabetes. Damn them. So it was that we went home bearing a Dance Pad for the Playstation 2, together with a dance game endorsed by Britney Spears herself.
There are adolescents in Fry's Electronics who, with maddening calm, step efficiently through entire rounds of this game with the most bored of expressions on their faces. Ten minutes into it, the Guy and I were both prostrate on the floor, gasping for breath while sweat pores jockeyed for position.
"You have a choice now," the Guy said later that night, when we'd packed away the pad and placed it in its own altar of fitness. "You can go for a half hour walk every morning, or do this dance game for twenty minutes every morning."
"Twenty minutes?" I echoed weakly. "It'd kill me."
The Guy, who had not fared well against the dance gods, conceded this undeniable truth. "Ten minutes, then," he amended.
From time to time, if our neighbors peek in through our window, they'll be treated to a ridiculous spectacle of my flabby ass jumping in time to some aerobicized techno music pap. That's okay. I have reconciled myself to the idea of becoming a svelte, bopping, Britney Spears taming miracle of fitness using a game that ten year olds could murder me in. I figure, there'll be much, much worse things coming my way soon enough.
As a final note, I should mention that I received a call from Binky this past Friday. Binky, who reads my journal, had been on the phone with my mother shortly after reading my last entry.
"..And you know," she told me, "you weren't kidding about your mom and aroe vela."
"Huh?" Japenglish from Binky was a mental shock; I wandered the word around in my brain for a little while, hoping to get some sort of connection.
"Yeah, I called her and told her that you'd posted something about her and aloe vera, and she said, 'aroe vela? aroe vela?' -- you weren't exaggerating at all. If I didn't know that was what she was saying, I wouldn't have had a clue."
I've had a lot of experience translating 'aroe vela' to 'aloe vera' these days. Every since I was diagnosed, my mother has been waving the prickly stalks in my face as a panacea that might not only make me thin! but also lower my blood sugar! cure my diabetes! and make my hair lustrous and long! Every phone call starts on aroe vela, includes aroe vela, and ends with aroe vela.
"You scare me," I told her wearily on the phone in Safeway, after she held forth on the wonders of vegetative homepathics.
"Hm?" she said brightly. "Aroe vela is so good!"