Normal/Not Normal

Today is 3 weeks post-surgery, and I vacillate between wanting everything to be back the way it was pre-surgery (minus the pain, of course) and wanting to continue to do mostly nothing interspersed with bouts of inertia and moments of fugue. I started teaching a little last week, and it was both exhilarating and exhausting: I loved feeling that teaching groove of expressing exactly what I mean in clear and concise terms, and immediately afterward I wanted a quiet dark room and a cool compress, because apparently life is more tiring now that I am INTEGRATING A PROSTHESIS INTO MY MARROW HELLO.

I behave the same way around other people: when offered assistance, I counter with "I can totally do this, thank you but I'm fine," but when no hand is held out, my mental dialogue vibrates with a self-righteous "oh my god I'm exhausted why on earth would you think that I could carry a plate of food by myself."

In school last semester I learned about cognitive dissonance (or rather, I was finally given a name for it): the act of holding two opposing concepts in our minds at the same time. Our human dislike for this jarring, discomforting sensation often leads us to validate one idea over the other for the pure mental relief, regardless of actual value. "I am a regular person just like you/ My needs are special and must be acknowledged" is my dissonant song lyric du jour. I can go to the store and carry a shopping basket,  but when someone holds the parking elevator to squeeze in an extra couple and their cart, I exude irritation from my pores and shift to make sure everyone can see my cane.


F. Scott Fitzgerald said "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." I'll keep working on the function part.

How To Be A Teacher

This past semester, I had class with perhaps the most terrible teacher I have ever experienced.

I've talked about this privately to a few friends, but felt I had to keep it basically under wraps until the semester ended, in the very, very slim chance that the teacher in question would somehow find his way to this blog and my grade would be affected.

And even now, I'm going to attempt to maintain a certain amount of anonymity in terms of who I'm talking about, though it wouldn't be hard to figure it out if you really cared to. But my point in writing is less about one person's behavior and more about what I think is an essential quality for any kind of teacher. I teach yoga, and I teach anatomy. Both shove my faults in my face constantly:  my know-it-all tendencies, my impatience, and my desire to be liked by everyone. I know a teacher who at the end of yoga class often says "Thank you for teaching me." I used to think it was corny, but he makes my point for me:

As a  teacher, you have to listen to and learn from your students.

I have to - have to - pay attention to the room and what they need, and adjust myself accordingly. If I'm not doing a good enough job explaining a concept or a pose, it's not their fault. In addition, if I am coming up against resistance (in any form - frustration, boredom, attitude), again, it's not their problem, it's mine.

Here's what happened in school, with the terrible teacher (let's call him TT for short):

About halfway through the semester I was approached by another student in the class who wanted to bring a list of very specific complaints about TT to the Dean of the department. I readily agreed, because I had been privately harboring many of the same grievances, but up until then had taken a more passive, put-your-head-down-and-do-the-work-on-your-own approach. So a few of us wrote emails to the Dean listing our complaints - and lest you think these were frivolous, the list included things like "refuses to answer questions" "does not explain lab procedures" "makes one class rule then changes it the next session" "is not present in his office during office hours" "makes rude comments when confronted with these issues."

The next time we had class, TT set up his power point as usual, and the first slide began with the words, "THE FOLLOWING EMAILS WERE SENT ANONYMOUSLY."

It was followed by a cut and paste slide of the emails that we had sent to the Dean, who had forwarded them to TT without our names on them (perhaps not the wisest move, the Dean later agreed). TT clearly had decided that an aggressive offense was his best defense. He spent the next 15 minutes going through the points made in our emails (take a second to imagine - an email of complaint you sent in confidence about a teacher is now being read aloud, word for word, by said teacher, to the entire class) and then flashed a second slide, in which he had created a point-by-point rebuttal to each complaint. These rebuttals were variations on "This is an unfair statement" and "This is not true" (though my favorite, in response to the complaint about his rudeness, read "Gas station attendants are rude. Grocery store workers are rude. I am not rude.")

His final slide stated, "THOSE WHO COMPLAIN ABOUT THE TEACHER ARE USUALLY THE ONES THAT ARE FAILING THE CLASS AND WANT TO BLAME SOMEONE ELSE."

[Not to brag, but I got an A, and I'm pretty sure the other students who complained did well also.]

Then we had to pretend like nothing had happened and take a quiz.

This is obviously an extreme example of how not to deal with criticism of your teaching. However, it reinforced my desire to stay vigilant in my own teaching and not allow myself to become complacent, lazy or indifferent to my students' needs. It means adjusting my teaching plan to match their level of ability or comprehension of the material (no one learns anything when it's going completely over their heads). It means picking up good teaching techniques from other teachers (I have had several exemplary teachers at this same school whose clever tricks I steal and use constantly). And it means not taking it personally if a student looks bored, or doesn't engage with the material the way I want them to  (including in yoga class. Students doing asana with a 'bored' body is my personal bugaboo and I have to do everything in my power not to hover over them and try to perk them up in every pose).

Being a teacher has to be a constant learning experience, otherwise you have nothing to teach. So thank you for teaching me.

I Got My Hip Replaced

So that, as they say, happened. On Tuesday.

What I do now is I lie around a lot, and when that gets too tiring, I sleep. I'm also enjoying eating constantly and never really feeling full (apparently I'm eating for two), and repeatedly asking people I love to do the same menial tasks over and over ("Can I get the ice pack?" "Can you put this ice pack in the freezer and get the other ice pack?" "Can I have some water?" "Can you get up from being totally asleep next to me and go make me some breakfast and some coffee?" "Can I have the other ice pack again and can you put this one back in the freezer?").

I have the same supine PT exercises they gave me after the last surgery, but what is very, very different is how astonishingly little pain I am feeling. This is day four post-surgery, and I am taking Aleve. Only. No Vicodin, no Percoset, not even any Tramadol. And I am full weight-bearing, with one crutch. I can't quite explain how mind blowing this is to me, after my last experience, but I am enormously grateful, and let's be honest, also enormously lopsided in the one hip (and by the way - if you ever have a shit ton of time and want to read about the minutiae of a much more difficult, much more painful surgery that took a lot longer to recover from, read my heart-wrenching, fascinating blog about it, brilliantly entitled "Paper Or Dysplastic?").

Part of my PT is to also walk as much as I can handle, which is not yet much, but I'm hoping my energy will come back soon (it's not for a lack of eating, I can tell you that much). I think the hip might be eating my energy, as it is, for the third time now, swole up to twice the size of the other. I don't know how many times it can take this swoled business. Anyway, can you get me the ice pack (and a coffee)?

Best Laid Plans

When I embarked on this mid-life crisis madcap comedy movie return to school adventure last fall, I had a general idea that I would finish in five years. I had 11 pre-requisite classes to take before the three-year graduate degree, and it seemed… possible to do them in two years? Hard, but manageable, especially if I didn’t plan to have a life outside of community college, and didn’t mind being in summer school all the way through (the DPT includes summer school), and possibly a winter session or two.

And then, of course, life started happening, and more specifically, arthritic hip raised its ugly head (of the femur! Yuk yuk. Nerd joke). Hip replacement surgery was no longer a far-off possibility, but a right now necessity. Still, I persisted. I sat down with my pre-req list and worked out a whole strategy that would allow me to get everything done and enroll in the fall of 2013. Lest you think the schedule I created was a leisurely educational stroll, I present it to you in haiku form:

Summer session – hip replaced –

Labor Day? Who the

Fuck are you kidding?

(Maybe not the best haiku, and maybe doesn’t even convey the reality of what I was planning on doing to myself, so instead I present to you my leisurely educational stroll in calendar form:)

Summer 2012 – Human Biology / test into Pre-calculus

August 2012 – Hip replacement class*

Fall 2012 – Pre-calculus / Anatomy / take GRE

Winter 2012 – Statistics / apply to grad schools

Spring 2013 – Physics/ Physiology

Summer 2013 – Physics

Fall 2013 DPT begins

*not a class

Looking at this list gives me hives. Unnecessary Hives, which is also the name of my autobiography. Some time last week, between interviewing hip surgeons and studying for my organic chemistry exam, I realized that there was no actual reason why I HAD to finish in five. My stubborn attachment to the five-year plan was a) Not Very Yogic, though I feel like often lately I’m Not Very Yogic (and while we’re on the topic, that seems a more likely autobiography title) and b) a by-product of a trick I constantly play on myself to get things done, called “Tell Everybody You Are Doing Something And Then You Have To Do It.”

At my brother’s wedding in Palm Springs four years ago, when I was still living in New York but feeling more and more like I could leave, I went around the entire reception telling people that I was moving to LA (though apparently I did not tell my mom, who was surprised to learn it from a cousin later that night). The desire not to go back on my words propelled me more rapidly towards a destination I would have reached eventually – but as I left the reception, casually flinging the words “See you next year!” to the Angelinos present (my future friends!) my fate was writ in cement.

In the same way, starting this blog with the pronouncement that I would be in school for five years made it, in my mind, an unchangeable truth. In addition, and you can add this to the Not Very Yogic column: I am terrifically impatient when I want something. I had wrapped my head around five years’ worth of school: how old I would be when I got out (don’t ask), what year it would be, what great career shifts would finally come to fruition. An additional year seemed truly unbearable, and sacrificing my free time and sanity seemed the best solution. I know that sounds ridiculous, and yet it felt violently true.

But letting go of that self-induced stressor (because that’s all it was) and giving myself room to breathe (what a concept, Not Very Yogic lady) and actually enjoy my life for the next few years (again, who knew that was an option) has created space for all kinds of things I was going to give up in the name of my set in stone plans. Like travel! And writing more! And hanging out with other people! And cadaver dissection! (It’s a form of hanging out with other people.) And how about this concept: giving myself adequate time to recover from having a freaking hip replaced.

So there it is. I’m taking the slightly longer road not yet traveled. More importantly: I’m not freaking out about it. Maybe I’m a Little More Yogic than I thought.

Back To School

10 tips for my fellow back-to-schoolers:

1. School is, once again, a total madhouse the first two weeks.  Be prepared to park far away and walk, which is entirely preferable to slowly tailing someone to their car in the student lot like a predatory shark, only to find yourself battling for their space with a slick-haired dude in a muscle car blasting rap at 8am.

2. There is nothing within a 3 mile radius that you will want to eat. Bring your own snacks unless you can subsist on lattes and a yogurt parfait for 12 hours.

3. Teachers, even the good ones, are totally weird people. Aren't they? Your organic chemistry teacher has a strange accent (truly, impossible to place. North African? Sub-Himalayan?) and even stranger speech patterning ("The electron is not cerTAINly at any location, it is only proBABly there."). You are oddly grateful, as class is in the evening, and straining to understand him helps keep you awake. You can pretend for those three hours that you're going to school in India.

4. Psychology classes always, always feel like you are in fact a participant in a psych experiment without your prior consent or knowledge.

5. Generally, the large groups of male students that congregate over by the science buildings are less intimidating than those that congregate on the main part of campus. If you need somewhere to sit outside and eat your parfait, aim yourself in that direction.

6. Do not wait on that 1/2 mile long line to get into the bookstore. Come back in a few days when it's diminished. You don't need your books the first week anyway.

7. With that said: Highlighters. Pens. #2 Pencils. Erasers. Scantrons. Get them all. They will sell out.

8. "Mature" students: when you walk in on the first day of class, several students will assume you are the teacher until you sit down. I will also assume you are the teacher, even though it has happened to me mere moments before. It's an innocent mistake on all our parts.

9. It's a little overwhelming. Don't worry about that. You'll get back in the swing of things.

10. Snacks. I cannot stress this enough.

Down(ward Facing) Time

It's been several weeks since school ended, and I've been swimming in free time (but before you get jealous, this doesn't feel like swimming in the ocean; this feels like trying to swim in marshmallows). I kind of don't know what to do with myself, and it also begs the question, what the hell was I doing with myself before I went back to school?

A large part of me can't wait for school to start again (although I am still teaching, just not that much), while a second large part wishes I was better at enjoying marshmallows, and another, also quite large part feels like I proved whatever it was that I needed to prove by going back to school for a semester, like I was on a reality show about moms and kids and swapping, and now it's time to return to our regularly scheduled programming.

The problem with that third large part is that I am nowhere near done. The other problem, having just registered for the spring, is that I can't realistically take more than 2 classes per semester while still having a job and trying not to go crazy. So, the five year plan may actually be six. Did I mention somewhere in there I have to fit in a hip replacement? Ha. Yes.

The good part: I've been fortunate enough to be observing a double amputee learning to walk with his prostheses the past few weeks, which is humbling, and fascinating, and emotional, and helps my brain to stop swimming in marshmallows and focus. It's as if the universe knew that I was feeling weary, and threw me a little view of my future to keep me on track. "You'll get to this place, working with clients like these," says the universe. "Slow down. Don't worry about how long the pre-recs are going to take. You'll get here."