Our friend Ammo Grrrll files this dispatch under the heading ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN. She writes:
Last week my shooting instructor fell in a practice run for his motorcycle precision drill team and injured his foot. A biker enthusiast in an unfortunate mishap.
One of our regular Wednesday night poker players (5 years in Iraq), sustained a broken neck from an IED and spent 19 months in hospital. A hero.
And Ammo Grrrll? This morning I woke up with shooting pains in my upper back and right bicep. From a repetitive stress injury from playing Candy Crush for five straight hours. An idiot with OCD.
This is not my first rodeo with repetitive stress injuries. Several years ago I began doing cross-stitch and embroidery on complicated baby quilts with thousands of stitches, and did it compulsively until I could barely lift my right arm above my shoulder. You perform ANY small motion enough times, be prepared to suffer the consequences.
I also sustained a “Sudoku Injury” in the form of a back spasm from leaning over at an odd angle at the dining room table working on a 6-star puzzle in a “Mensa Level” puzzle book. Yes, I can hear you wondering what a person with such a long learning curve is doing with anything with the label “Mensa” on it. Point taken.
Some people hurt their backs lifting automobiles off accident victims, or doing the firefighter’s carry with a dead-weight unconscious person in a burning building. Or EMTs carrying an overweight heart attack victim down 3 flights of stairs on a gurney. But it takes a special person to hurt herself on a pointless 9-box Japanese puzzle.
So, if you ever see me hobbling, limping, or with an arm in a sling, please do me the favor of not asking, “How did this happen?”
If you’ve ever played peek-a-boo with a baby, you know that he will NEVER tire of it. You can do it until the cows come home, and it will always be exactly as fresh and funny to him as the first time. Most of us grow out of this stage and develop the ability to be bored. In fact, eventually, you will become either a teenager or a rich, decadent piece of Eurotrash in a Fellini film, and then you will be bored by EVERYTHING.
One of the things I like about myself is that I take immense pleasure from dozens of small things, a trait I learned from my dear mother. She is 93 and, in our daily phone call, will say things like “Daddy and I went to McDonald’s and split a coffee and cherry pie, and it was just so much fun!”
So, I have almost no capacity for boredom. I can enjoy the same music, same food, same movies and books over and over. And also over. It’s just that – like that baby – I don’t always know when to stop. But, I’ll stop writing now. I have to finish my quilt by early afternoon so I can start another one as soon as I get past Level 286 in Candy Crush.
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