My Knee: A History You Never Wanted to Read About

Seems like every person has a few bodily injuries they like to complain about—or at least pull out and tell stories about to people who really don't care and become less and less interested as the tale goes on. If you are likely to be one of those disinterested people then you may not be interested in the history of my knee, although I (like all those other inconsiderate, self-absorbed people you hear these stories from) will continue on in telling my story anyway.

The tragic tale of how I injured my leg begins when I was three—it is distressing because no three year old should be hurt and in pain, and less appalling because how I managed to maim myself was due to my tripping over a garden hose.  If there is not a fantastic story to go along with an injury, the injury becomes less and less interesting.

People only care if you're injury is entertaining . . . So I will try not to bore you with uninteresting back story.

The real story all began on a Friday afternoon.  I went to work, sat at a desk for long, music-marinated hours, drove home, and began cooking dinner at my apartment.  As I was standing around cooking potatoes, or green beans, or whatever it is I desired to cook that evening, my leg started to feel strange.  At first I ignored it—because this is what I do.  I have a working theory in my mind that if I pretend I am not hurt, then I am not.  I think this theory could probably be likened unto the ostrich theory—if they can't see the predator (because their head is stuck in the sand) then the predator can't see them (with their body sticking awkwardly out of the sand in plain view, just waiting to be eaten.)  You'd think after enough failures of this theory I would realize it should not continue on in its progression to become a law.  However, I am a slow learner.

A Tour Never to Forget

When I was a young and oblivious thirteen-year-old I was in a choir—which is a relatively normal kind of thing for a young teenager to do.  I wasn't particularly talented at singing, or reading music, and I was definitely on the young end of the choir, but when they decided to tour the USA they let me sign up just like everybody else.

My mother had a minor/major heart attack and . . . duh, duh, duh bought me a cell phone so I could be in constant contact. One of my few claims to fame in my family is owning a cell phone at thirteen—usually my parents start getting their children cell-phones around the time their children start driving.  Although I did have to deal with the awkward "brick" cell phone my family got for me.  Now days you can hardly get a phone that isn't a smart phone, I suppose the "brick" of now would be a flip phone.  The brick of my time as a thirteen-year-old was a small grey square that I immediately recognized was uncool.  I went through stages of thinking I was cool because I had a phone and realizing I was lame because my phone was not an icon of modernity.

Because I was young and obsessive and because my mother was my mother we bought every single item on my itinerary for the tour—which is weird, do not do this.  We also labeled every single thing we bought with my name (as we were instructed to do, and which probably no one else on the entire tour did). Every shirt, every pair of pants, my shoes, probably my underwear was labeled with my first and last name in permanent marker.  We were extreme in our preparation.