The Scourge of Becoming an Old Man

Spring semester: day sixteen

You know, if I felt the least bit sick -- at all -- I would at least have something to blame these aches and pains on.

No, seriously.

I'm twenty-nine years old. I'm really not an old man, yet over the past week I have begun to develop what I can only describe as "old man problems."

I mentioned in my last post how I somehow pulled a back muscle while sleeping, and couldn't tell you how (because, frankly, I don't know). Said muscle is, as mentioned before, in my upper back on the right side, located somewhere around the bottom interior of my shoulder blade and/or is attached to the back of my ribcage somehow. I thought it was getting better as of Friday, when I wrote that last post. Well, it's really not. In fact, last night I slept really poorly because my (formerly) most comfortable sleeping positions somehow pull on said muscle, or otherwise irritate it. This means that if I toss and turn in my sleep -- or even moderately move as I sleep to unconsciously get more comfortable, I am jolted awake, quickly, by a bolt of muscular pain.

Again, I will reiterate that I have no clue how I can pull a muscle in my sleep, or why it hasn't healed by this point -- this happened almost a full week ago now.

On Saturday, I went bowling with the majority of our crew of GTAs. There were a few of us who didn't go, but we had a crew of about twenty of us there. It was really fun; over the course of four games, I bowled something like seven strikes. Which, for me, is unheard of. It's probably the best I've bowled in my entire life. I started every game I played with a strike except for the last one (and I still got a spare on the last one). The third game, I got two strikes in a row. Again, unheard of. During the entire time I was bowling, my muscle was hurting, but just barely. It didn't affect how I bowled, which I thought it would.

Yesterday, of course, I woke up and it was aching more than ever -- with a nice, right-arm muscle ache and joint stiffness in my elbow and wrist (from bowling, of course). And, for some reason, my left thigh and hip ached as well. All of them bothered me all day.

Bowling isn't exactly an athletic sport, you know. It's rolling a ball down a wood floor into a bunch of pins. There's no running or exercise really involved. Hell, there's not even heavy breathing involved.

I'm too young for this shit. That's the point I'm trying to make. I take my vitamins daily, I get exercise on a regular basis, and this weekend I've even got a lot of sleep. So, again, I don't know what's wrong with me, and again, if I felt ill at all, I could at least blame it on the possibility that I was getting sick. I'd blame it on my bed were it not for the fact that the bed is the same one I've slept on since I moved to Kansas from Missouri three years ago with no real problems -- the former girlfriend opted to let me keep it and get a new one when we broke up and she moved out. So, really, I doubt that's the problem.

As an aside, I sometimes wonder if my "lifestyle" of sorts is catching up with me. I do drink a lot of coffee, smoke a lot of cigarettes, and spend three to four days a week running back and forth between school and home at full tilt. I also don't eat a whole lot, and when I do, it's not generally as healthy as it used to be. Despite this, I'm still (very slowly) losing weight. Maybe I'm just slowly running myself completely ragged and my body is, in turn, slowly destroying itself. It's as good an explanation as any, I think.

Or, perhaps I have cancer. Who knows. At this point nothing would surprise me. Or really bother me, to be honest with you.

Oh, I have cancer? Yep, that sounds about right. Oh well.

What I do know is that it's 2:30 in the morning on Monday, and this weekend has gone entirely too quickly. I really didn't get a whole lot accomplished. Today, before I return to my work week tomorrow, I must go out to Walmart and purchase some essentials and then replace the gas in my car that I used in my extra trip to Wichita and back on Saturday (lest I get off my normal fill-up schedule, which would screw up my mileage count). I also have to sit down and do my taxes, which (again) I conveniently forgot about after I mentioned them here before.

No, I did not watch the Super Bowl; there are two TVs in my house, and neither one of them was on the entire weekend save for Thursday night, when I watched a few episodes of The Real Ghostbusters on DVD while I was eating dinner. While I may love football, I had no interest whatsoever in any of the Super Bowl or its accompanying festivities -- I am indifferent about the Giants, and outright hate the Patriots with a burning passion. Because of that, until I saw mentions of it popping up on Twitter, I had basically forgotten it was even going to happen today.

Although I will say that as a Papa John's rewards member, I did end up winning a free pizza and a 2L bottle of Pepsi Max because of the coin toss contest they had. For those of you who didn't know, Papa John's did a contest where "America" could pick heads or tails for the coin toss. The voters picked heads, which meant if the coin toss came up heads in the actual game, all rewards members would win a free pizza and 2-liter of soda. It did come up heads, so, free pizza for me. I've been a rewards member almost since I moved to Kansas, since they're really the only people I order pizza from. They do promotions like this a lot; I've arbitrarily won free pizzas from them before (because they're awesome).

Occasionally, however, I will order from Pizza Hut, but that's only because I sometimes want a stuffed crust or a P'zone.

Despite my aches and pains, I did get a few things taken care of today; I paid all the bills, I cooked a small dinner, and I did all of the assignments for my poetry workshop (three in all). I also cleaned the cat room, did all the laundry, washed and replaced the bedsheets, and did a few various other small things. Right now, Sadie (one of my cats) is sleeping peacefully on my foot. It wasn't really a bad day. I've been taking aspirin -- I've found that it's really all I have in the house, apparently -- for the muscle aches, and it works well enough.

This week I have a lot on my plate, or at least a lot coming up. My students' first papers are coming due (small ones, only worth 20 points), which I must spend a good chunk of next weekend grading. I'm also diving into the first unit of my class headfirst, as well, and will be covering the first two of three major texts they'll be writing their first of three large papers on. On Tuesday afternoon (so, tomorrow) all of us taking this semester's visiting writer will meet with him for the first time, when he will introduce himself to us and we'll more than likely schedule meeting times with him for the next month. I also need to collect books to donate to the EGSA's book sale fundraiser, which we'll be holding over the week of Valentine's Day, and there should be another meeting or two on Thursday afternoon with them, the department journal, or both that I'll have to attend as well. And that doesn't even count whatever work I have to do for the other classes I'm taking. The semester is, indeed, ramping up quickly.

I have put in my "application" of sorts (really, it's just filling out a form that says "yes, I'm interested") to teach over the summer. There are but four classes available to be taught by GTAs. Yes, that's right, four. Over the entire summer. The chances that I'll actually get one of the four is really slim, of course, as pretty much every GTA who plans on staying in Wichita over the summer has expressed their enthusiasm to teach one of them. As our first-year class contains at least a few native Kansans who live in/around the area full-time, my chances of getting selected are even slimmer. Unlike most grad students who can and do go home over the summer and live with their parents, I don't have that option -- I'm not going anywhere and will still have three months' worth of bills to pay without a regular paycheck coming in, not to mention another car insurance payment that will be due at the end of June. If I don't get one of the four teaching positions, I'll have to find something that will bring in literally thousands of dollars to live on over those summer months without paychecks, and I will need to find it very, very quickly once school ends. This is not a prospect I look forward to, no, not at all.

But, again, that's something I really can't worry about much at the moment. For now, at least, I have to again focus on the present, and getting the current stuff taken care of.