Let's all agree/Never to be/Macho again.

Steps to ripping your foot up and freaking out your mother.

1) While sitting in chair reading, abruptly feel dizzy and nauseous.

2) Reaction: "no! I didn't exercise yesterday, so I have to do it today! I will cure this ailment by means of taking it to the limit!" *

3) Change clothes and get on the treadmill, actually nearly falling down while climbing over the baby gate keeping the dogs out of the treadmill room. I could have just taken the gate out of the way, but that would have required bending over, which I felt I could not do.

4) Jog a mile and then take a shower, feel extremely dizzy upon emerging from shower because I have not had enough fluids today. Think, "it can wait until I eat in a few minutes." Do not drink a glass of water before putting on deodorant, etc.

5) Fall the fuck down and rip foot open on baseboards, cuss extremely loud, kind of hunch over there glaring at the baseboards for a second looking for something wrong with them to complain about.

6) There's nothing wrong with the baseboards - I am very talented and fell at just the right angle to rip the top of my foot open on the baseboards, of all things.

7) Limp out of bathroom sniffling and freak out Mom, ask her if she can put some bandaids on my blood-soaked foot that I cannot reach without falling the fuck down again.

8) Complain to internet.

* As per toxic cultural narratives of health/abledness/masculinity, which I have made fun of plenty of times on this blog and elsewhere. For this story it is important to remember that I am 1) pretty dumb, and 2) also a huge hypocrite.

Trolling

* Lord of Light is a stupid bullshit whiny-baby-Mary-Sue book that's not even paced competently and should never under any circumstances be referred to as a "classic."

* You can call A Night in the Lonesome October a classic, though. That's fine.

* The Hugo and Nebula awards are invalid on the basis that Salman Rushdie never won either of them.

* It's hilarious for reasons I cannot define that in 1989, the year The Satanic Verses would have been up, the Hugo went to Cyteen, Cherryh's probably-best sci-fi book, and the Nebula to Falling Free, Bujold's probably-worst.

I mean, you're not really going to get me to argue about Cyteen, I will allow that it defeats The Satanic Verses in several categories, including the ones that matter most to me personally. But Falling Free? For real? They can't have been serious. Did Bujold get snubbed for something else and they were going, oh, shit, gotta fix this gotta fix this, quick let's pin a gold star on this hastily-edited first draft!

* The Wikipedia page for the thing that beat Midnight's Children to the Nebula is also pretty funny. I'm sure that all of these ideas seemed very compelling in 1980.