So, I Guess I Can Cross "Driving the Get-away" Car Off My List of Potential Occupations

For the past few weeks, I have been marveling at Dr. ___'s secretary's ninja skills. Well, I should have been taking notes because today showed that I clearly need some remedial ninja lessons. Stealth mode: you're doing it wrong.

Let me give you a brief synopsis of the evening:

• Attempted to dress as Julia Child, but got my big-ass arms stuck in the 1950's waitress costume my mom had. Spent 10 minutes trying to wiggle my way out of it. Finally had to get my mom to free me, which took another 5 minutes. Upon seeing me in my underwear, my mom remarked, "Oh my god! You have a gaping hole on the back of your leg!" Is it a bad sign when the only "oh my God!" moment you've had when naked in the past few months involved a) your mom and b) the extreme muscular atrophy surrounding your anti-ass?
• Dressed in my sister's Rainbow Brite costume, which screamed "wardrobe malfunction!" Discovered my mom's cache of '80s cocktail dresses and eventually picked out a kick-ass black-and-white polka dotted mini-dress with a huge train and a bow on the back and dressed up as a cigarette girl. (In my defense, I suspect that even the most cat-like ninja would be impaired by a train made of 2 feet of polka-dotted fabric and a great, big bow).
  
• Called A. to remind him to not let Mika out on Halloween so that she would be safe from fireworks and drunken assholes. As we were speaking, Mika did her own trick or treating by bringing in a dead bird and dropping it on A.'s backpack. (Snickers bar...lifeless finch....same diff).
  
• Went to Cheryl's house for a pumpkin-carving party. Did not carve a pumpkin because, really, the only positive thing to come out of me handling a knife would be a very exciting blog post.
• Finally, after a quick shower and Steph doing my hair and me being totally late, I arrived with Steph at Jay's party.

Now, see, I am not the hugest fan of Halloween, probably because I already walk like a zombie, so I pretty much celebrate the holiday year-round whether I want to or not. Unless you have a comfortable costume, (or you're drunk, which I wasn't considering the got-hungover-without-being-drunk fiasco of last weekend), you're pretty much guaranteed to spend the evening fidgeting around uncomfortably after the initial "like, oh my God, you look great. What are you supposed to be? I'm a slutty nurse/ladybug/witch/sorority-girl-with-devil-horns!" moment. And, let's face it, between the anti-ass and the swollen hip and the gluteus medius muscle detached from my body, "comfortable" is not something I feel on a regular basis, so my tolerance for restrictive clothing is pretty much at zero.

I was dressed as a cigarette girl, which means that I had the dress and little white gloves and a jaunty cap (it was really jaunty) and my hair done up and, of course, my cigarette tray filled with Popeye cigarettes (sorry, Popeye candy sticks). First, the gloves came off (didn't want to ruin them while gorging on chocolate and chips). Next came the cigarette tray (because it kept dumping candy cigarettes in my lap). Then, the hat, which (though jaunty) was giving me a headache. Then, my hair fell down so I took all the bobbie pins out. Within about an hour, my costume became less "cigarette girl" and more "broke-down '80s prom queen whose hair is out of control even by '80s standards because she's been getting it on in the back seat of someone's dad's Buick." It became increasingly clear that either I had to go home and lounge in my sweatpants or else I was going to get sick of the dress' boning and wind up naked.

So, at 11 pm (yes, lame, I know), Steph, L.P. and I tried to sneak out so that no one would give us the side-eye for our lameness. This was tricky for a number of reasons.

1. I was driving my mom's SmartCar, which only seats 2 and there were three of us
2. One of the three was wearing a gigantic polka-dotted cocktail dress with a train.
3. Everyone at the party was surrounding our car and lighting fireworks within a foot of it.

What's a ninja to do? Using our sneakiest of sneak moves, Steph, L.P. and entered the vehicle in a way that was probably more "clown car" than "crouching tiger, hidden dragon," since L.P. was sort of crouched side-saddle on Steph, holding on to her shoulders. Since the fireworks were in front of us (not to mention a crowd of innocent bystanders), we decided to pull a U-turn. Problem was, some middle-aged lady was so engrossed by festivities that she stood in front of my car and would. not. move. Blowing the horn was, of course, not an option, so we made frantic hand gestures. She didn't notice. More frantic hand gestures. Still nothing. I tried inching towards her in an attempt to give her a gentle love tap with my bumper; (I'm pretty sure the only injury you can get at the hands of a SmartCar is that you'll melt into a puddle from its cuteness). She still didn't notice. Finally, she tore herself away from the riveting spectacle of someone lighting one single firework to move the two feet we needed her too.

Next problem: while small, the SmartCar is difficult to turn because you can't crank the wheels when the car's not in motion. We therefore did (in front of everyone) a 96-point turn, trying to turn the world's smallest car around on a fairly big street. With everyone watching us. And me having more blind spots than Fox News because there was a mass of L.P-on-top-of-Steph-ness blocking my side mirror. And Steph laughing hysterically every time I did one more turn. Ninja. Fail.

After dropping both Steph and L.P. off, I went home to the loving arms (okay, legs) of my sweatpants, whereupon I noticed that my stuck-in-a-dress ordeal had left bruises on my arms. That's how stuck I was.

So, yes, happy fucking Halloween and bring on the daylight savings time.

Don't Call Us, We'll Call You: Okay, This Shit is Getting Boring

SurgeonWatch2009 has been going on so long that I've run out of snarky ways to discuss my surgeon not phoning, so I will give it to you straight up, no chaser: no, Dr. ___ did not call today. After countless days of playing the most one-sided game of phone tag ever, (tag, you're it! Tag, you're still it! Tag, you've been it for three weeks!), I took a day off from SurgeonWatch2009. But today, alas, was not without its disappointments.

You know how I've been talking about how badly I wanted to get down to Illinois to see the Neko Case concert because my friend knew the guitarist and had VIP access, and how my plan was to book a flight the minute I saw the surgeon and knew what the hip-timeline was? Yeah, well, the ticket kind of fell through. So, now, endless questions: do I try to purchase a ticket without knowing whether I can even make the concert? Is there a way to purchase a ticket so that, if I am not able to go, A. could go in my place? Can I even purchase a ticket? Should I take this as a sign that the concert is not to be? This question is made all the more prudent by the fact that I've learned that Sarah Harmer is opening for Neko Case and Sarah Harmer's "Dogs and Thunder" is one of the first songs I ever learned to play on guitar and is my very, very favorite to sing when I'm having a bad day and I really want to hear it live. Fuck. Why can't Urbana be closer to Vancouver?

It did not help that it was dark and rainy in Vancouver today and that I was a dumbass who decided to walk for an hour, then do half an hour on the elliptical machine at my mom's friend's house, then try to walk back home. I slogged through the rain for half an hour until I got a couple of blocks from my house and my hip quite literally refused to go any further. I had to stop, rest, and turn off my Ipod so as to devote my full powers of concentration to walking the last block or else I would probably have still been standing there, humming "I Believe I Can Fly" and trying to levitate home, since it probably takes more than the Jock-Jam remix to get all 160-odd pounds of Arleyness of the ground.

When I used to play basketball, Tuesday practices were devoted to "chair skills," which is a euphemism for "push so hard you vomit your breakfast several times in your mouth and have to swallow it because you're in the middle of a set and can't stop" (sorry, gross). I actually really loved chair skills (there's something so fantastic about being done, when you've exerted absolutely every ounce of energy you have and you're pleasantly tired and that drink of cold water tastes like the best thing in the world), but every once in awhile when I would hit the wall, I would count down how many more pushes I had until I could rest. Just knowing that I only had 50 more pushes (even if it was untrue) gave me something to focus on and made everything seem more managable.

So, there I was, dragging my hip along the wet-leaf-strewn minefield of the sidewalk, counting outloud to myself. I'd set 200 steps as my target goal and it actually turned out to be pretty accurate because I reached my front yard at 190 steps and I got inside the house at 212....where I promptly took a shitload of Extra-Strength Tylenol and had my mom make me tomato soup (thanks, mom!). When I got home, I also learned that my brother's girlfriend's mom (who's an orthopedic nurse) had sent me tons of information about repairing a torn gluteus medius. (Thanks!) I'd found so many conflicting reports on the internet that it was great to read some information that's been sanctioned by an authority higher than Google. Here's hoping that Dr. SecondOpinion can get the surgery party started.

Don't Call Us, We'll Call You: This Has Been Going on Too Long For Me to Come Up With Interesting Post Titles

It's a few weeks into SurgeonWatch2009 and you all will be shocked (not really) to learn that Dr. ___ did not call. He did, however, have his secretary call again. And, here, the secretary's ninja skills really become apparent. Though my mom was home at the time, the phone did not ring. The voice mail appeared as if some invisible carrier pigeon slipped through the window and dropped it into the phone. Homegirl is good. Anyhow, the secretary didn't have much to report: she thought that Dr. ___ had already called me, but since he hadn't she would put some pressure on him to do so. Obviously, her ninja karate-chopping/ intimidation skills are still under construction because Dr. ___ didn't feel inclined to pick up the phone. Still, you've got to hand it to the secretary for at least calling me back (kinda).

Where was I when the phone message was being delivered magically into our voice-mail inbox as if by tiny phone elves? At physio. What was I doing there? Getting a This-Is-How-You-Recover Seminar courtesy of a physiotherapy repeat customer. When I first started at physio, there was a round little man with a well-groomed moustache who'd had a knee replacement at nearly the same time that I had my hip replacement. About a month after we both started physio, moustache-man graduated and waltzed on out of there swaggering like a rock star, while I stayed behind bruising my ass on the exercise bike and trying for the 3586th time to unsuccessfully do one single clamshell exercise.

Today, I was doing my daily trampoline exercise (don't ask) when who walks in but moustache man! Turns out, he's recently had his second knee replacement. And, yes, he's only three weeks post-surgery and is already walking better than I am. Have you ever played Mario Kart and you run one too many times off the bridge in Bowser's Castle and end up sizzling your ass in lava and wasting precious seconds being fished out by that little cloud guy? And you see some other go-kart smoking up behind you and think, "Damned if I'm going to come in last place," so you unleash the fury of your red shell only to realize that your rival Mario-karter was actually lapping you? Yeah, that's the feeling I had at physio. I was lapped by someone with a finely trimmed moustached.

What's that shaking sound I hear? Oh, that's just the shaker from all the salt that's been poured into my wounds.

Steph's Birthday Cake

Since I promised I would post pictures of the cake I made for Steph's birthday (read: since I will take any opportunity to showcase my cakes), here it is in all its glory. The inside was a spice cake with cream-cheese frosting.

If I ever have a cake company, I am going to call it either O-C-Delicious (due to my obsessive degree of detail...no one makes chest hair out of tootsie rolls like I do) or Ghetto Cakes, due to the fact that I own hardly any cake-decorating tools. For example, you'll notice that most of my cakes lately have been blue/turquoise. This is because it's the only shade of food colouring I own up here. How many cake pans do I have? One. Which makes that baking layer cakes takes twice as long. Do I own a piping bag? I do not. Instead, I cut the tip off a Ziploc bag. After this foray into scroll-work, however, I think that I might invest in a piping bag, but cake-making can be an expensive (not to mention fattening) hobby and it's a slippery slope. Today, it's a piping bag. Tomorrow, I'm buying little silicone molds and edible glue and various luster dusts.

Okay, none of this is hip-related. Moving on!

Don't Call Us, We'll Call You: Takin' It Back to the Old School

Another day, another message on Dr. ___'s answering machine and I am beginning to feel like a stalker. If Dr. ___ had a facebook page, I would totally be creeping on him. (I just checked to see if Dr. ___ really does have a facebook page, but unless he dresses up as a 20-year-old goth kid with high cheekbones from Michigan on his days off, I suspect that he does not. Oh well. There goes my chance to beat him at Bejeweled Blitz or send him a fix-my-fucking-hip-themed snowglobe). So, yes, SurgeonWatch2009 continues with a vengance.

In the meantime, I decided to get out my frustration the old-fashioned way: by pumping some iron. I used to really like weight-lifting. There's just something about lifting hundreds of pounds of solid metal above your head that makes you go fuck yeah. In fact, back in the day my max bench press was 245 pounds. I was kind of a beast.

For about two years before the surgery, I couldn't weight train because a) I had some mono-related heart problems and for a good year the only exercise I was allowed to do was watch "Bulging Brides" or "Last 10 Pounds Bootcamp" on TV and b) when I was finally cleared to weight train, I almost immediately developed the "hip not staying in its little socket home" problem, which weight-training aggravated. Want to know what's not fun? Having your hip come out of its socket while you have over a hundred pounds of metal suspended over your head. True story.

Since it's been 2 years since I've done any serious weight training, I decided to go back to the basics so I didn't get injured, because Lord knows that the last thing I need is a torn rotator cuff to match my torn gluteus medius. If I'd had my way, I would have gone back to the modified Jillian-Michaels cardio-plus-mild-weight-training workout I was doing before the surgery, (which was fun in a "my face is so purple I suspect my head might explode" kind of way), but none of it was post-hip-replacement friendly. Luckily, I remembered that way back in 2001, when I was starting to get serious about weight training, a friend of mine sent me the program he used to do when he was a national-team wheelchair racer in the 1980's, which he had named the Lifting Heavy Things workout. Even more luckily, I am an email packrat and never throw anything out, and I had even saved the workouts in a handy folder.

I figured that since my life is beginning to resemble the summer of 2001 more and more (no job, living with my parents, etc. etc.) I might as well embrace the deja vu by taking my weight training plan back to where it started. You know, like the circle of life, but with lat-pulldowns instead of the whole birth/death/ashes to ashes business. The fact that the weight-training program was created in around 1986 didn't deter me in the slightest, since the '80s gave us all sorts of awesomeness, like Pavement and Felt and The Pogues and Jesus and Mary Chain and, of course, me. (Speaking of me being born, International Arley Appreciation Day is Nov. 15th. Mark your calendars and prepare your sacrifices to the Arley shrine that I know you have in your house. I will also accept mixed tapes/CDs and cake).

Anyhow, weight-training ended up being a rather ambivalent experience. Yeah, it felt good to feel the familiar lactic-acid burn, but on the other hand I was depressingly weak and kitten-like and nearly everyone was stronger than me. To those of you who say "stop comparing yourself to other people! It's the journey, not the destination!" I say, "What's the point of weight training if you can't out-bench-press teenage boys, causing them to crowd around your lifting station with ego-deflation and reverence, whispering amongst themselves that, dude, she can totally bench press more than you and she's, like, a woman?" Another downside: I was so unused to weight-training that my arms began to shake, which made using my cane a little wobbly.

It is, however, good to mix up the workout program. I've been relying too much on the elliptical machine, which is making my anti-ass swollen. This is not entirely bad, since it would be very easy for people to mistake the swelling for my having a real ass. Nothing like a little inflammation to even things out down there. It does, however, make sitting down particularly unpleasant.

Anyhow, yes, bottom line: despite the fact that my workout should be renamed Lifting Fairly Light Things To Prevent Injuries, it was a tiny, little victory. Considering my obsessive nature as of late, though, I will have to work hard to not over-do it. I don't want to have to report in a month's time that either a) I have become a quadriplegic from dropping a bench-press bar on my throat or b) my arms have gone all Popeye-on-steroids. Moderation: not one of my strong suits.

Don't Call Us, We'll Call You: And the SurgeonWatch Continues

There are some things in this crazy world that you can rely on: the earth is round, the sky is blue (unless you live in Vancouver), the delicious taste of beef brisket cures all manners of ailments and afflictions, and my surgeon will not freaking call. Yup, it's been nearly three weeks since my doctor received my MRI reports and a week since my family doctor told me about the torn gluteus medius, and still Dr. ___ is still playing hard to get.

Have I left messages? Yes indeed. Has anyone called back? Absolutely not. So, as time ticks by and my phone does not ring, I'm turning to the power of the internets for answers. Usually, the internet is a divine source of all knowledge, wisdom and pictures of cats using bad grammar. (I am, after all, the woman who beefed up a 30-page graduate-level essay by wikipedia-ing various lit-crit scholars and tossing in a few quotes. Academia: ur doing it wrong). In this case, however, the internet seems only to be a source of confusion.

Most sites I've visited say that a torn gluteus medius is usually repaired surgically. Some, however, say that surgery is often unsuccessful and can only be done in some cases. (Though, why some cases are operate-able and some are not is unclear. Is it based on the severity of the tear or the time elapsed between the tear and when it's discovered?). One site even bucked the trend and said that a torn gluteus medius never requires surgery. Medical writers of the internets: you people need to have a conference call and get your story straight because this shit is ridiculous.

Now, of course, this whole labryinth of confusion could be prevented if the doctor would pick up the phone and/or schedule me an appointment so we could have a little chit-chat about what is to be done. Instead, I'm watching episode after episode of "House," which is like medical porn to me because everything happens very quickly. People get sick, tests are performed, diagnoses are made and revised and re-made, someone has an "aha!" moment at exacly the right time to save a patient's life, and everything is wrapped up with a bow in an hour. No one waits three weeks for a phone call. No one resorts to google to see what's wrong with them. A lot of people run around frantically, House makes a few caustic remarks and does something borderline unethical, and happy endings abound.

See, at the end of the day, I don't mind if my doctor is a douche-kabob as long as he gets shit done. We don't have to bond over martinis or have a meaningful heart-to-heart over tea and scones. I just want prompt medical attention. Or, if there's a good reason why I can't have prompt medical attention, I want to know that reason so that I don't find myself trying to decipher the medical-ese of some internet article at 3 a.m. Because, believe me, the number of medical articles I read at 3 a.m. is directly proportional to the amount of cranky phone messages Dr. ___'s office will receive the next day, which isn't good for anyone involved.

Why I Will Never Again Drink a Mango Margarita

I am good at many things: getting myself into bizarre situations, writing elaborate similes, baking X-rated cakes, the list goes on. Something I am not good at, however, is drinking. The reason: I get terrible hangovers. Worse, my body does not seem to understand that to get a hangover, you usually have to be drunk the night before. Clearly, it missed the memo that a hangover is nature's way of saying, "Sure, waking up next to that unfamiliar man in a seedy hotel room wearing someone else's clothes was fun, but I hope you enjoyed yourself because you're about to pay the price for your misbehavior." Hangovers: nature's time-out chair.

Last night was Steph's birthday party and I made her a cake (the pictures of which will shortly follow). For her party, she made mango margaritas. Now, usually, I stick to whiskey, since I'm allergic to wine, can't drink more than two beers without my stomach feeling like it's filled with bread dough that's quickly rising and threatening to rupture my stomach lining, and can't drink sugary chick drinks because they give me bad hangovers. Last night, however, I decided to break my whiskey-only rule and drink some mango margaritas because a) they weren't very strong and b) the fact that I hadn't been hungover since my surgery suggested that perhaps my Freaky Cyborg Hip could hold its alcohol better than I could and maybe I'd been cured of my bad hangovers. Yeah, not so much.

As the evening went on, I decided to break my "I don't get drunk because it makes me annoying" rule, so I had a couple of mango martinis. After four (the drinks really weren't that strong) and a beer, I felt only mildly buzzed. That's when the little angel on my shoulder began alerting me to the following facts:

• The only good reason to get drunk is to get the courage to hit on someone and there were no single men at the party.
• It's going to take me probably 8 mango martinis to get drunk, which will put me on a fast train to Hangover Town, stopping only briefly in ThrowUpYourGutsInFrontOfEveryoneVille.
• I drove to the party and should stop drinking because I can't stay overnight since my parents would worry if I didn't come home and, yeah, sure, I could take a cab but that costs money I don't have and then I have to get someone to drive me down in the morning, which is annoying.

The voice of reason won. I stopped drinking and quickly became sober, even though my hip began to hurt really badly for some reason, and I spent a great deal of the evening completely distracted by my Freaky Cyborg Hip, staring off to space with my "pain face" on, which is the vacant, glassy-eyed heroin-addict-y expression I get whenever my hip hurts. (A random side-note about my pain face: it's fairly easy to recognize and once, many years ago, A. and I were in the same fiction workshop and he noticed that I was clearly in pain because I was staring off into space. A few hours before, I'd been in the hospital because my hip was having one of those turning-blue-and-being-excruciatingly-painful episodes and I'd gone into shock and my hip was still in a weird position and it was all I could do to stay sitting and not rip my hip out and beat myself senseless with it. So, A. smiled at me in order to cheer me up. I smiled back. The teacher noticed me smiling and made a big fuss in front of the whole class asking two or three times whether I'd like to share what was funny with the whole class--this is, remember, a graduate workshop--and basically treating me like some unruly kindergartener. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I will never do a PhD).

Bitter digressions aside, the bottom line is that I never did get drunk. This is why I was surprised when I woke up this morning with a mouth that felt like I'd been making out with a ball of cotton and a terrible headache. How, I asked, does one wind up with a hangover when one has not been drunk? Isn't that like being wrongly imprisoned for a crime one did not commit?

So, yes, I am still in bed though it is 5 p.m. listening to Jesus and Mary Chain and editing my novel. This is turning into the week of '80s indie rock.