I'm Back! Kind of. Maybe.

After a six-month absence, I seem to have broken the cardinal rule of blogging, which is to post on a regular basis. I also broke the second cardinal rule of blogging, which is don't start a blog about your semi-detached ass, but I think I get a free pass on that one.

So, after 224 posts spanning several hundred pages and nearly 2 years, why did I suddenly go AWOL? Was it because my hip magically healed itself, my gluteus medius grew back and there was nothing more to write about? Nope. Was it because I got tired of making jokes involving puns on the word 'half-assed?" Unlikely. That shit never gets old.

In truth, there were several reasons, but the main one was that I just got busy. Right now, I have 3 jobs, 2 volunteer positions, a book coming out in the Fall and a cat who sits on my chest and slaps me in the face when I'm sleeping if I don't pay enough attention to her (true story). Plus, now that I'm living in Vancouver, land of "Would You Like Some Sky-High Rental Prices To Go With Your Seasonal Affective Disorder-Inducing Climate?", a girl's got to hustle to make ends meet.

Honestly, I was also getting tired of talking about my hip replacement. After two surgeries, months of rehab, and countless people approaching me on the street to ask what's, like, wrong with me, I wanted to get off the Arthroplasty Express and spend a little time in Normal-28-Year-Old-Chick-Doing-Normal-Shit-Town. (Okay, yes, I know. 'Arley' and 'normal' go together as well as 'Vancouver' and 'sunny days.' But still!) I was beginning to get known as That Girl Who Had A Disastrous Hip Replacement instead of That Girl Will Publish Her Second Book By 28 or That Girl Who Looks Totally Awesome And I Wonder If She's Single.

It all reached a boiling point when a guy I used to play wheelchair basketball with was like, "Arley's so obsessed with her hip. She doesn't talk about anything but her hip. She wants to have sex with her hip." I kind of freaked out and vowed to stop blogging that night. Working in wheelchair sports and having played them for most of my life, you get to know a lot of people with disabilities. 95% of those people are well-adjusted and generally awesome -- or well-adjusted but kind of douchy, it varies -- but there's a small percentage who seem to see themselves as A Disabled Person, as if that's the only thing about them. I didn't want to ever become the kind of person who devotes the bulk of their Facebook status updates to being like, "OMG! It is so hard being disabled! Recently, someone said something that could possibly have been perceived as discriminatory and I am going to freak the fuck out and go on an exclamation-point-fueled rant about how people are so ignorant and it's a good thing I'm so strong and brave and can overcome the weight of society pressing down upon me! P.S. I just got pink butterfly stickers for my wheelchair and they are totally rad." It's a problem whenever you can boil your identity down to a single phrase, whether it's 'disabled' or 'cat enthusiast' or 'a warlock with tiger blood and Adonis DNA' (#winning), and I didn't want anyone thinking of me as someone who's obsessed with her disability.

Also, not going to lie, it's a little disconcerting to be like, "Good news! My blog gets over 5,000 visitors a month. Wait, bad news! 86% of those visitors are just here for the 'sexual healing' post I did on post-surgical sex positions, which means that there are a lot of sick fuckers out there jacking off to cartoons of old people getting it on to the point of hip dislocation." (Side note to whoever Googled "Arley McNeney naked" and/or "Arley McNeney boobs": If you need the help of Google to locate my boobs, you are probably never going to see them in real life. And by 'probably' I mean 'absolutely.' And by 'absolutely' I mean 'Seriously. Really. Eww.') Bottom line: if I'm going to be helping some guy get off, I want to at least be enjoying myself in the process.

So those are the reasons why I left, but here are the reasons why I'm back. (Maybe. Hopefully. Depending on how the whole 'having 8 million jobs and trying to have a social life' thing pans out). First, my mom has been on my case about it forever. (Hi mom! Love you!). Second, however, my friend J.T. (no, not Justin Timberlake, though he and I are pretty close) is having a hip replacement tomorrow and we actually have the same surgeon. Don't worry, it's not the guy who did the first surgery!

One of the cool things about "Young and Hip" has been hearing from people all over the world who are thinking of having a hip replacement or have already had one or who are supposed to have one but now I've terrified them and they'd rather drag their arthritis-stricken hips through hot lava than go through with the surgery and wind up like me. (To the latter group, I have this to say: Despite everything that happened, I wish I'd had the hip replacement years ago. If I'd had my surgery on a different day or with a different doctor, you would never have heard about me because I'd be off living my life thinking, 'Hey, remember that mildly-to-moderately painful time in my life when I got a hip replacement? That was so worth it for all the awesome shit I'm doing now.')

Anyhow, while I've heard from tons of different hip replacement patients, I've never known anyone in real life who's my age and about to go through one. And considering all that J.T. has been through to get the surgery, I thought I'd give her a little shout out to wish her luck. So, good luck J.T.! Here's hoping that you recover quickly and are soon back to living the dream. Hip precautions may be annoying, but three months is a short period of time and soon you can throw away your ass cushion and post-hip-replacement sex manual and enjoy life as a pain-free bad-ass cyborg. Keep me posted!