Physical labor is not my forte. I am comparatively weak for my size, and my joints do not enjoy physical activity. Thus after a week of moving furniture, installing new blinds and affixing shelves to walls, I am quite sore throughout my back and legs.
This is actually somewhat odd since I do physical labor for work. Not the high impact work of construction work or the heavy lifting of appliance delivery, but moving large, heavy bins full of books, each bin ranging from 5 to 50 pounds. You would expect that I would have been prepared for the moving of a few items of furniture from one room to another.
This was not the case this week.
Part of the problem is that I haven’t spent anywhere near enough time stretching before and after heavy lifting, combined with my bizarre and oh-so-not-healthy diet. My body doesn’t have the self-repair capacity of someone like Chuck Norris, whose body can probably restore itself like a Borg cube.. Or Royce Gracie, the son of Brazillian jiu-jitsu founder Hélio Gracie, who can probably regenerate wounds as quickly as Deadpool, albeit without the scar tissue.
I, on the other hand, take a long time to recover from the most minor wounds. Days to heal cut fingers–and that’s with Neosporin; weeks to heal from sprains; months to heal from minor fractures and years to heal from more serious wounds such as severe breaks, severed arteries or decapitation.
Of course, healing back from decapitation is quite an ordeal, and I really don’t want to have to go through that again.
Still, now that my apartment is in a more orderly condition, I should be able to get back to life as usual, with the possible exception that I will have to mop my floors now and again, rather than simply vacuuming them and hoping that gravity prevents germs from climbing up the rug fibers.
I still have the sink that needs to be installed, and I’ve been using the kitchen sink to brush my teeth and wash my hands. This feels so wrong somehow, as though I am risking the infection of the kitchen sink with toothpaste germs or something. I know it’s a conditioned response. Brushing my teeth and spitting into any reusable container other than the bathroom sink seems filthy. Perhaps I could spit into the toilet and drink from the bathtub faucet, but that seems… Kind of redneckish.
To quote Atrus from the Myst series of games, “I realize my apprehensions might never be allayed and so I close, realizing that the end has not yet been written.”