Saturday, March 20, 2010

Flesh and Blood



My own flesh and blood, son Will, was bitten this week by a dog. It's a pretty tragic situation BUT I am not going down that path in this here blog today. I promised my tens of readers that my next blog would be about saggy middle-aged skin or slagging on my husband. My husband has been kind of an ace lately so skin wins.

Just for a moment though I would like to say how much I love the word slag. If I were English, I would use the word slag all the time. I'd be all, "I'm totally slagging on you, Portia." Or, "Slag that, Hermione."Alas I am not English.

So here's what happened. We don't have any mirrors in our house. I don't know that it was intentional but it's the case nevertheless. Recently we installed a fairly large mirror in my son's bathroom. Thankfully it's a thin mirror not one of those fat mirrors they install in bathing suit changing rooms. I'm so accustomed to running around not knowing what I look like that I was caught off guard when I glanced my arm in the mirror. Thin mirror mind you.

"Oh my God!" I said to no one. I had that separation going on that grandmas have. I can see my arm bone / muscle and then there's this swinging flesh below it. Now listen, I've never been a girl with ripped arms. I got lucky with my legs. But arms, no. Constant battle. BUT my arms were as ONE. Now they are as TWO. Now one part goes one way and the other part goes the other way.

This can't be. I'm actually on the thin side right now having just come home from Ethiopia with a stomach bug. Sure I haven't been to the gym in 2 months but come on. COME ON!

I'm at a loss. I don't even know what to do for arms that are as TWO. There's no exercise for that. I need the bottom part of my arm surgically re-attached to the top part of my arm, like Steve Austin when he became the Six Million Dollar Man. There's no jazzercise class that's going to fix this problem.

I'm one of those people on The Biggest Loser, who lose weight but no matter what they do, parts of their body keep moving long after they stop walking.

The thing is, what snapped me out of it, was my son getting bitten by the dog--his flesh exposed in a big way. It's sort of weird to think of ourselves on a cellular level, on a tissue level. But that's the truth. We are cells and tissue and blood and other funky looking shit.

So on a positive note, because I am an organ donor, anything the doctors want to salvage can be more easily found because my mortal coil is shuffling off. Apparently starting now.

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause; there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
--Hamlet, William Shakespeare

NB I saw Jude Law in Hamlet and I don't care if he is 5'9" and has slept with everyone including his landscaping crew. He's hot. "Just slagging on you, Jude."

1 comment:

  1. Me too. ME TOO. (BTW, I've given up trying to figure out how to not comment here as Judson, hope he won't hate me for it when he learns how to read.) I don't blame child birth for the hell my body has gone to, I blame breast feeding. When I was breast feeding, the fat melted off me. Now that I'm (a) no longer breast feeding and (b) rapidly aging, the fat is showing up places I've never seen it before: my back, my arms, my gut and, I kid you not, my knees. I have fat knees.

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