Please, ladies, destroy the "sanctity" of my marriage. I would consider it an honor.

So I had my first session at the Egoscue Clinic in San Francisco last Tuesday. The clinic is conveniently located, practically upstairs from the BART Montgomery station. You can't really tell from the photos on their website, but the space is open and airy, with lots of light.

I met my therapist (A.B.) and we had the "so, what brings you in today?" conversation. After reviewing my history, it was time for the moment of truth: the photos. When you go to an Egoscue Clinic, one of the diagnostic/evaluative tools they use is a digital camera. (Used to be a Polaroid, but they've moved on with technology.) They take four photos of you (front, back, side & side), then superimpose a plumb line before printing them out. This forces allows one to see just how badly misaligned and skewed one is.

It would be good for me to open up my binder and look at the photos again, because when I first saw them my brain went into "AIEEEEE I LOOK LIKE A CRESCENT MOON WHEN I STAND UP ACK ACK ACK!" and I think I might not have really evaluated them calmly and coolly. In any event, they show that I am indeed badly misaligned; my right hip is higher than the left, my right foot everts, and the entire pelvis is out of vertical alignment (too far to the right). "Your right hip is having to work much harder than the left," A.B. said, "which is causing the pain in your back and your leg."

She also had me walk back and forth across the carpet several times, to get a sense of how I move when I walk. And how do I move when I walk? Answer: not enough. My shoulderblades and thoracic spine are held tight and locked up (probably from being braced against the pain), which impairs the ability of my arms to swing freely when I walk. And my right foot slaps down to a much greater degree than the left.

Next she put me into the Static Back exercise position (lie on your back with your calves up over a block or chair, legs up at 90 degrees from the torso, knees at 90 degrees) for a bit while she put together my first menu of E-cises. She took me through all the exercises on my menu to see how I did with them and give me pointers on form, and rearranged the order of a couple because of my particular misalignment issues.

After that, and once I'd put my shoes back on, we went over the binder of things she was giving me to take home. It includes a listing of my E-cise menu, plus detailed descriptions (including photos) of each E-cise, plus (ack!) my diagnostic photos.

I was very pleased with the experience. The space is lovely and conducive to the kind of work they're doing; the people who work there all seem friendly and competent; and my pain is SIGNIFICANTLY reduced. We wound up signing up for the 16-visit Friends & Family package so spiritualmonkey and I can both get fixed up and functional again.

I've been doing my menu every day since then, and the difference is PHENOMENAL. I graphed my painkiller use since April 1, just to get a visual (before April 1, it looked much the same, except the values were more in the 4, 5, and occasionally 6 range):



I LURVES me some Egoscue Method!

Got another appointment tomorrow.

or a transportation engineer, or anything like that, but I would think that just maybe Monday morning commute hour is not the best time to shut down two of the four lanes of 8th Street going through Chinatown, from about Alice to Broadway, for construction.

At least, that's what I thought about as the bus sat motionless for five minutes on the way in this morning. And since the bus was hemmed in by construction equipment and such, it wasn't really possible to say "bah, I'll walk" and get off.

Harrumph.

Mildred Loving, matriarch of interracial marriage, dies

RICHMOND, Va. - Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday....

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

"There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause," the court ruled in a unanimous decision.

Peace and blessings to her, peace and healing to the people left behind who loved her.

Like so many of the people who achieve heroic things, she never set out to be a hero, just to live her life.

We will be keeping ginger syrup on hand in future. Low effort, high payoff. Yum.

Or Zingy, as the case may be.

The monkey and I are both fond of Fernet Branca with ginger ale. (Yeah, yeah, he's a bartender, we live in the Bay Area, and we drink Fernet. We're 3° off from normal most of the time; we get to be conformist every now and then.)

One of the most common ways of drinking it around here is a shot of Fernet with a ginger ale chaser. Rather than drink it that way, we prefer ginger ale with a Fernet float, a beverage I dubbed the El Perro.*

Why El Perro? Well, the name's in Spanish because the only place that loves Fernet more than San Francisco is Argentina, where Fernet con coca is not only the national drink, it's the name of a pop song that spent weeks at the top of the charts.

¿Y porqué «el perro»? If you drink it without stirring, each sip starts with Fernet and ends with ginger. It's an auto-chaser. *rimshot* Thank you, I'll be here all week.

Anyway, it's been a challenge to find a ginger ale that stands up to the Fernet and balances out its rather assertive flavors, much less find one that's easily available in markets near us. Bundaberg is pretty good, but only available (that we've found) at the Jack London BevMo. Blenheim sounds interesting ("The 'hot' variety is handy for giving yourself a tracheotomy") but I've never seen it around here.

Serendipitously, the latest issue of Imbibe has a recipe for homemade ginger syrup. Right now, there's a stock pot simmering away on the stove containing a pound of ginger (roughly chopped, then whirred in the food processor until finely minced), two cups of sugar, and six cups of water. It smells great. The back of my nostrils tingles every time I inhale deeply.

Zingy indeed.

*I grew up in a state that has "The La Brea Tar Pits", and where most people don't even blink at a construction like "drive south on the El Camino". I plead diminished capacity in the realm of multi-lingual phrases. Je suis una loca Californian.

What dialect do you speak?

I came up as 41% Yankee — "just barely Yankee" — which I guess makes sense: Boston/California on one side, Tennessee/Idaho/Oregon/California on the other, born & raised in California by parents who were* both big ol' language geeks**. (I lost track of how many times I heard my mother grumble "It's miss-cheh-vuss, not miss-chee-vee-uss, dammit!")

One pronunciation quirk that I don't usually see in dialect quizzes like this is the characteristically Californian raising and flattening of vowels (which is something I consciously work against, but which comes out more strongly when I'm tired, I think). I remember Mom saying to me once, regarding my friend Tobin, "His name's toh-bin, dammit, not teww-bin."

"Mom," I said, "he's a Californian. His name's teww-bin."

Also, um, the characteristically Californian lack of enunciation, especially when tired. Mom used to rant about how all her Beginning Acting students had terminal cases of "California Wooden-Lip".

I think that although I inherited my language-geek inclinations from both parents, for Dad the geekery mostly manifests relative to the written word, but for Mom (the director and theatre professor) it most often manifested regarding the spoken word.

via Metafilter

*One still is, luckily.

**Do I even need to say "and I mean this in the most positive, loving way possible, because I are one"? Surely not.

Okay, the New England Yankee side of me thinks it's much too soon to be posting anything about this. However, spiritualmonkey has been nudging me to write something. So consider this a preliminary report.

I recently got the book Pain Free: A Revolutionary Method for Stopping Chronic Pain by Pete Egoscue (pronounced ee-GOSS-kyoo, apparently) from the library last week. If you start researching back pain, Egoscue is one of the names that keeps coming up. Many people have recommended his work highly, but I hadn't read any of his books before this.

Egoscue's basic theory, as cribbed from the beginning of his book The Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion: A Revolutionary Program That Lets You Rediscover the Body's Power to Rejuvenate It:

You are not moving enough to keep your body and overall health from deteriorating. And when you do move, because this "motion starvation" is acute, the movement violates the design of the body with every step you take.

Because the primary muscles aren't strong enough to do their jobs, the secondary muscles try to compensate (while still trying to do their own jobs as well). This torques the body out of musculoskeletal alignment, which makes it even more difficult for the muscles to move the way they should, which torques the body further out of alignment, which... you get the picture.

The books include set menus of exercises ("E-cises") intended to retrain the muscles and realign the joints. Do these every day, preferably in the morning so you start your day with movement and proper alignment, and you WILL (he says) see improvement.

I've been on prescription-strength painkillers for the past month and a half due to a sciatica attack. Two naproxen sodium intended to reduce the inflammation of the sciatic nerve, and three to six Tylenol with codeine, depending on the intensity of the pain. I don't like being on the codeine and have been trying, without much success, to taper down and get off it entirely. For at least two weeks, I've been trying to get through the day on two Tylenol, but by the afternoon I've needed to take a third, and by the evening I've often needed to take the fourth one of the day.

Sunday morning I started doing the E-cise menu for low back pain, once a day in the morning.

Yesterday afternoon, I looked at the clock and realized that it was 4:30 pm, I hadn't taken a single Tylenol with codeine that day, and I didn't need to take one then. And it wasn't a matter of toughing through it, it was a matter of not being in enough pain to need to take one.

At this point, I haven't taken a Tylenol since Tuesday afternoon, and I don't feel like I need to take one now.

Wow.

There's an Egoscue clinic in San Francisco. I have an appointment on Tuesday. If four days of doing the generic low-back E-cise menu from the book can reduce my pain this dramatically, I'm eager to see what a personalized program can do.

I was feeling down and sad on Saturday morning when I serendipitously came across a couple of videos that got added to the "makes me feel happy" file.

First, an ad from the Discovery Channel, "I Love the World" (which has made this big ol' sappy moosh cry every time I've watched it):


( Transcript behind the cut )
In a similar vein, Louis Armstrong giving a delightful live performance of "What a Wonderful World":



And if you haven't yet checked out the engineers' guide to cats that twistedcat linked to, if you like cats, geeks, or any combination thereof, you should click through. Made me laugh aloud.

If you had told me as a teen that 20 years later I would have total strangers approaching me on the street to say "hey, you look cool," I probably would have laughed at you in disbelief.

I love my hat.