You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'body parts' category.
I suppose it’s not quite proper to talk about your body on the internet, that is if you haven’t just had some life-altering “extreme makeover” tummy-tuck that has decreased your dress size while increasing your overall confidence, attractiveness, and relationship with the after-school Safeway bag boy. This is, at least in part, because we aren’t supposed to like our bodies. Bodies are sometimes awkward; they get in the way of what we want to do (I notice this most especially when playing tennis, a sport which particularly challenges my hand-eye(-wrist-ball-foot) coordination); they inspire us to do things we sometimes know we shouldn’t (like, in my case, lie under the duvet an extralongtime on a cold January morning). And they appear strange to us, because most bodies don’t look all that much like we hoped they might, which is to say like some lingerie model or Olympic swimmer.
But I’ve been going through a phase lately–let’s call it my “vanity phase”–and I actually like my body, wrists and all (we’ll get to the wrist part momentarily). And the main catalyst for this phase is one small but astounding experience: the Christmas Eve push-up contest.
After watching claymation Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer and baking sugar cookies, and before going to Christmas Eve service, I thought it might be good to fill my downtime with some exercise.
“Let’s have a push-up contest,” I said to my dad.
“How many do you think you can do?” he asked casually.
Now, I should pause here to say that when I was a child my dad, a former football coach, taught me wrestling (or wrasslin’ if you’re from Virginia) moves on the living room carpet, an activity that never failed to leave me in tears because, as my mom always said, he “played too rough. (They’re girls, Bo.)” Which is a euphemistic way of saying that for most of my childhood I was kind of a wimp. I was tall and skinny and bony in all the wrong ways.
But now I’m on the push-up program and things have started to turn around for me. I mean, fine, I’m still kind of wimpy. People still occasionally stop me on public transportation to ask if I’ve broken my wrists–no, I haven’t, and yes, they both look like that. But for the first time in my life I thought it might be a good idea to challenge my dad to a contest. So before I know it, he’s facing me, palms to the floor. “Let’s go,” he says. I’ll admit, now that he’s in his fifties with two prosthetic hips, my dad isn’t quite the competition he was when I was nine and he was thirty-something. But he’s been going to this new gym, and he’s still no slouch. Once we started going, all these warnings my physical therapist had given me about how bad push-ups were for my wrists started running through my mind. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, I hesitated. What if I sprain something? But when we got to eighteen and he started slowing down, I could almost taste the sweet push-up victory.
Fine, maybe you’re not impressed that I beat a fifty-five year old with a handicapped parking tag in his glove box in a push-up contest. But I am! I’m still, three weeks later, bursting with pleasure at my sheer physical strength. And I came home to find that Justin had bought me the most romantic Christmas gift of all:
Yes, those are wrist-friendly push-up bars, which make the entire push-up experience not only more pleasant but also more challenging. In fact, just writing about the push ups makes me psyched to do some as soon as I finish this post. If you’re not on the push-up train, people, jump aboard. You’ve got eleven months to prepare to shark your dad in your very own Christmas Eve push-up contest. And I promise you, it’s worth those days of waking up to sore pectorals for the moment of glory that comes with no longer being the weakest member of your nuclear family. Sure, they’ll eventually grow tired of you asking if they want to feel your muscles. But probably, for the first few times, they’ll oblige you. And you’ll spend a couple weeks feeling like a bad ass.
And no, reader, I don’t want to have a push-up contest with you. Because I’d like to bask in the glow of my own physical prowess for a few more days, until the next time I go to the climbing gym and see some sixty-year-old in spandex warm up on the climb I’ve spend the last three weeks trying to finish.
exhibit A:
(essay on wrists here)
We’ve all heard it before. The human body is a complex and miraculous machine, its cells and nerves and circulatory/nervous/pulmonary systems all intricately choreographed in a carbon-based ballet. But I want to take a moment to celebrate a much undersung hero of our infinitely complex biomechanics: the cartilaginous disk of the temporomandibular joint:
One Sunday morning when I was seventeen, I stood in the shower, looking up at the spray in a groggy, sudsy haze, and I yawned. Click. Something had moved. Something was wrong. I screamed loud enough to bring my mother running. I didn’t know it then, but out it had slipped, that wiley disk. The disk that so gracefully glides between jaw and skull (that little purple thing you see above) had somehow gotten cramped up behind my mandible rather than above it, resulting in an unwelcome bone-on-bone connection and a jaw that would not close.
Perhaps you are wincing now, as people seem to do when I find myself explaining this story. But ask yourself, how can we truly celebrate a spectacular feat of evolution if we do not stop to consider its failures? After a few days of minor pain and mashed potatoes, the disk found it’s way back home and settled in comfortably.
Ten years later, standing in the kitchen one afternoon before office hours, I attempt to take a bite of Justin’s egg sandwich only to feel it slip again. That was two weeks ago. Slip of course implies a mishap, the banana peel on the hardwood floor, the cartoonish sound effects of America’s Funniest Home Videos. The disk’s migration is similar to these slippages in that by the time you realize it’s happening, the event has already transpired. This time I did not scream. I took deep breaths, called the dentist and asked (perhaps tearfully begged is more appropriate) for help. In the next few days the disk slipped several more times and I learned a few notable things:
-how to manually pull my jaw down and forward, just enough to trick the disk into sliding back into place
-that a reported 20% of the population experience problems with this very joint
-that the world of soft foods in not as mundane as it appears at first glance; many things taste excellent when blended (example: chinese veggie noodle soup)
-that in the event of a minor personal health crisis, students will graciously and without complaint end class early
-the tmj (the abbreviation for the joint, not the syndrome) is an evolutionary masterpiece when you stop to consider it’s multi-directional mobility
Out of the goodness of my heart, I have refrained from linking you to the cut-away video of a cadaver’s tmj disease, which, while viewing, elicited almost as much excruciation as the dislocation itself. If you google image search tmj, you will find it.
