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Sick, sick, sick.

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate being sick?

If I haven’t, or if you missed it, let me say it loud and clear right here. I hate being sick.

Monday night I went out to dinner with some friends and then watched The Fall at our friend Ben’s place. (It’s a gorgeous movie, especially if you have a chance to watch it in the theater, which I did the first time I saw it, or on blu-ray, which I did the second time I saw it.) Maybe halfway through the movie, my throat starts hurting. Bleh. I assume it’s from my allergies (everything in LA is blooming right now, geez). By the time I get home, it’s pretty painful, so I take some Tylenol, it feels better, I go to bed.

Wake up the next morning, and I can barely breathe, my throat hurts so badly and my nose is completely stuffed, and I’m all over really achey. That’s a little worse than just allergies. So I call in sick to work and spend the day drinking tea with honey, napping, watching some TV and teaching myself to knit. All stress-free, relaxing stuff.

Wednesday morning I wake up feeling quite a bit better, so I go into work. I’m fine for most of the day and even part of the evening, so I go to Hollywood with some friends to watch improv. By the end of the night, I’m feeling pretty sick again, and, once again, I wake up the next morning (today) feeling really gross and sore.

Whenever I get sick, I constantly feel dirty and sticky. It gets so bad that I just randomly get up from whatever I’m doing and wash my hands. Or I’ll force myself to take a shower or bath. Randomly. Sometimes twice a day. I feel gross.

And to make matters worse, now that I have a job, it starts to wreak havoc on my mind when I’m sick and can’t do work. I check my emails (via iPhone or webmail) and start freaking out. I’m letting the whole team down, my irrational mind screams. I can’t be sick! I have to feel better now! We have a release next week!

Today, I even got up out of bed, after checking the emails and subsequently freaking out, and tried to pull some clothes on and make myself go to work… but when I started feeling a little dizzy and weak while brushing my hair and getting ready in the bathroom, I knew I was pushing it. The last thing I need is to pass out in the middle of the office.

Sometimes I think that my work ethic will be my downfall. I’m absolutely paranoid about being a bottleneck, or letting someone down, or not giving 100%. To the point that, when I’m sick, it makes me even sicker by stressing me out more. Bleh.

How’s spring treating everyone else so far?

Growing Pains

That, my dears, is my younger sister, in what I assume she has chosen to be her wedding dress.

I was futzing around Friday afternoon, trying to make my stomach stop churning so I could eat something before we went to my friend Sarah’s birthday party, when my phone made it’s little “We got a text message!” sound. I opened up the text message and there was my little sister in this flowing white number with a grown-up, ready-to-start-her-life grin plastered across her cheeks.

As I’ve mentioned a couple times before, I’m very happy for my sister, although I’m a little worried because she’s so young. She’s going to have to deal with that; it’s my job as an older sister to (try to) be the wiser, more experienced example.

Lately, though, I’ve been feeling very left out, and a little unsure of my place within my siblings.

My older brother is married and getting ready to start his own little branch of the family tree, and my younger sister is engaged, planning her wedding already. But where am I?

I’m over in California, living with my relatively new-ish boyfriend (we celebrated one year together last month), going out to clubs in downtown LA and Hollywood for friends’ birthdays or just because we want to, trying out new restaurants and dying my hair pink.

Yeah, it seems pretty glamorous, I guess. But where does it put me within the scope of my family?

Well, it puts me way the hell over on the other side of the country. That’s where it puts me.

I don’t want to get married just yet, and I’m definitely not ready for kids, but I feel like I should be somewhere at this point.

It’s really a strange feeling, actually. On the one hand, I’ve got my friends and coworkers that I see every day, who are all in roughly the same place as me. But on the other hand, calling back from a distance, I’ve got my family, which seems to be moving forward… without me.

I’m still in roughly the same place I was two years ago. My brother and sister are both in completely different situations, dealing with completely different lives than they had two years ago. Granted, I have a full-time job now and live in a different city with a different significant other. But what about my life and my priorities has really changed?

Even more, do I want anything to change? Can I even expect anything to change?

I wish I could just shut out all of the influences coming in from all angles and just live life how it feels right, how it works for me and Derek, regardless of how it works for anyone else. And I try, very hard, to carve out my own little path and stick to it, but when everyone else is going in some slightly different direction and saying that it’s the way to go, it’s harder to stay true to that little path that is just my own.

Guess this is just a part of growing up — figuring out where exactly I need to be, and where I need to go.

I just wish I weren’t so torn.

My kingdom for a swimming pool!

I’ve had issues with my back since my sophomore year of high school (that was way back in 2001, by the way, how crazy is that?). I haven’t been able to pinpoint exactly where it hurt or anything, it’s just kind of an ache and a tightness that moves around quite a bit. My parents took me to get an x-ray back when it first started acting up, and I went to physical therapy for a while. I have to admit, though, that I was terrible at physical therapy. I think that’s in part due to the fact that my doctor didn’t tell me exactly what was wrong and how the exercises the physical therapists were telling me to do were going to help. Needless to say, I wasn’t really motivated to continue doing them if I didn’t know why I was doing them. So I just kind of ignored the pain and it just seemed to go away. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t question it either.

In college, my back seemed to do pretty well. I didn’t really have any issues with it hurting unless I did something really strenuous (like moving heavy stuff, etc). Again, I still wasn’t sure why, but I subscribed to the “not broke, don’t fix it” mentality.

Now flash forward to the past few months. I’m waking up every morning and my back is killing me. I can’t sit still at work because it’s aching constantly. It’s back to sophomore year of high school.

So after being told by two primary care physicians that there’s nothing wrong with my back (or my knees, but that’s a different story), I finally convinced my current doctor to let me get a full spinal x-ray so we can figure out once and for all what’s going on.

Last week, I went back for my results. She explained, section by section, exactly what’s going on. Mild curvature in the cervical and thoracic (mid and upper) regions; slight dextroscoliosis (meaning the muscles on my right hand side pull my spine slightly to the right) in the lumbar (lower) region.

In short, there’s a little bit going on, but it’s nothing to worry about too much. The doctor tells me she has a recommendation for it. Not physical therapy, this time. Exercise…

My heart sinks. Exercise? Seriously?

…in the form of swimming. Jogging or cardio might make my back worse, and I don’t really need to lose any weight, so they wouldn’t really help in any other areas either. So, swimming it is.

Wait, swimming?! I love swimming! Swimming is hardly exercise for me at all!

Artist’s Rendition of Jess in Pool:

So… slight sidetrack here. Funny story… those times in high school and college when my back was doing just fine?

Yeah. Uhm. About that… In high school, my back stopped hurting when I started taking a lifeguarding class. In college, I was swimming pretty regularly in an individualized swimming lesson (my forward crawl is weaksauce).

So, of course, I’m really pumped to start swimming again! Of all the exercises my doctor could have picked, she picked the one that I feel most comfortable doing (even if I’m still not that great at parts of it).

There’s only one teensy-weensy problem.

I’m not in high school or college anymore. I can’t use their pools. And our apartment building has a gorgeous little courtyard, but no pool.

Shit.

This means, for the second time in my life, I have to join a gym. A public gym. One that I pay money for (and not in the form of tuition) and have a contract with and share with people I don’t know.

Luckily, there’s a 24 Hour Fitness about a block and a half from work that has a pool. Problem solved? Not quite.

24 Hour Fitness allows you to sign up for membership online, and plunk down your money via credit card right then and there. But I’m nervous, because there are way too many choices. Should I just sign up for this one club, or pay a little extra to be able to go to other clubs as well? And should I pay monthly or pay for a year in advance?

And, of course, being the little internet-dependent girl that I am, I just had to look up reviews. Cue the list of gross things that people have seen in or around the pool and locker rooms, and various complaints about the staff and facilities.

So… I’ve basically established that I have to actually go in to the 24 Hour Fitness and find out for myself.

I mean, I shouldn’t really worry too much about grossness in the pool, I guess. That’s what the chlorine is for, right? And I can pick up a pair of plastic sandals to wear in the showers and between taking shoes off and putting feet in pool…

Next apartment we live in, the building must have a pool.