Ouch.

Ow.

Oweeeeeeeeeeeee.

OK…that’s probably more whining than anybody can stand.

I hurt/tweeked my back yesterday getting a big “express mail” box from Mexico out of the back of the Cherokee.

I’d picked up a huge box that needed to be mailed that had some kind of fragile metal tree in it earlier….so I was working around that and when I tried to maneuver this big Mexican speed bump around all the other packages, something strained a little.

IT STRAINED!! DOWN IN THE BACK!!

I hate it when that happens.

Oh, well…surely it’s a passing thing. Someday soon my back will stop feeling all bound up.

I typed that sentence about “tweeking” something in my back…and it hit me that “tweeking” looks kind of like “twerking”…and then I thought about twerking…and then I thought, “How strange that would be if I hurt myself twerking…”

What a conversation starter that would be if the orthopedic specialist had to put “twerking” down as the mechanism of injury.

Hurt is hurt…there’s no difference in the outcome…so if I hurt myself doing something as age inappropriate as twerking…something as violently stupid but kind of cool and bizarre as twerking in my living room…well, a twerking mishap like that would definitely add to my already voluminous street cred.

But, I didn’t hurt myself twerking.

I hurt myself picking up a heavy box and trying to maneuver it around a bunch of slightly smaller boxes and a big box with a weird metal tree in it.

There’s nothing cool about that.

Nothing as cool as a twerking incident.

It’s my sister’s birthday today.

We’ve both been around for a little while.

I’m three years older than she is…but a gentleman doesn’t say his age…so you’ll just have to guess how old she is.

My dad used to love to tell the story of the mockingbird imitating Beth calling for me in the little backyard we had in San Jose….”Petah? Petah?”…imitating my little sister well enough that my parents wondered what she was doing in the backyard.

We were so little.

And now we’re BOTH SO MATURE!!

Anyway, I hope that she has a great birthday…

You know, when you hurt something like your back…unless it’s really hurt…I think that what you need is a little bit of mobility. You need to move around a little.

(Jenny asked me when I got up early if maybe stretching would help …and I guess that I must have barked at her some because she got mad about me barking…but she was right…stretching would help…)

Working it out…moving a little…at least for something as minor as a Mexican Express accident…is the thing that would help my situation.

But my inclination is to hold it all in tight and to not want to move it. I want to fixate on this sore back, protect and nurture it, revel in the fact that I AM HURT.

And because I know that it’s there…that it’s hurting me a little, that I’m in some minor discomfort, I can extend the discomfort as long as I need to.

I know what will happen, though (in my situation…I don’t think that it’s anything chronic…it’s just the result of too much sitting around and not getting any exercise).

I’ll get out, get busy, start moving around….and forget that I’m hurt…and soon I won’t be hurt and things will be back to normal until the next giant international express package wracks me up.

At least, that’s the plan.

Some of this stuff that we grab onto tight tends to stick around longer than it needs to.

“Let It Go” Frazinga Manchild