Spinal drama

So, #55 on Google's hot trends list today is do dead people watch you shower. According to some blog post or other, it was #1 at one point. It's a book title. I'd say I hope the ultimate answer is no, but actually, I don't really care if they look, as long as they don't touch. :P

I'm feeling incredibly relieved today because my lower back seems to be all right. As you might guess, it almost wasn't all right. See, following a stressful couple of days at work, I was attempting to put both my feet behind my head in yoga class on Wednesday. I was relieved to have checked in an important bug fix in time, and was, possibly, being a little forceful in my attempts. A very harsh reviewer of my life might say I was yanking a bit. Anyway, I felt something give in my lower back, along with a sudden wash of pain in that area. I released immediately, of course, but it hurt and it kept hurting, enough that I had to sit out most of the rest of the class. I took ibuprofen and drank lots of water and skipped the gym on Thursday, and now, though I can feel it a bit when I first wake up, it seems it's going to be just fine. I went back to yoga on Friday, and despite all my paranoia and going really easy on forward folds, etc, it never twinged once.

I'm so, so glad this seems to have been a warning shot across the bow, and not that sudden event that leaves a person crippled for life or something. Did you know that 80% of adult Americans have lower back pain?? Well, I don't, despite being tall and thin, and despite sitting in an office chair for 10+ hours a day usually, and despite asking my spine to perform reasonably mighty things for me.



Oh, sigh. See that? I need to not take that for granted! Argh! My best guess for what happened this week is that a muscle was under too much tension, and the Golgi tendon organ made it release suddenly (that would explain the giving/lengthening sensation). I released as fast as I could, but not before the muscle got overstretched and some bones probably ground into each other in some nasty way. Whatever it is, I think I need to be more careful with myself. I had no warning -- nothing hurt before suddenly it really hurt. So it's not necessarily an easy proposition, finding the edge where something is interesting/challenging without being on the edge of injurious. I need to try though. I don't make my living this way, and I'm not going to be a circus performer, I do this for the joy of it -- which is going to be totally negated if I accidentally snap myself in two or even keep overstretching things.

That left adductor? Thanks for asking, it's feeling quite a bit better. Maybe I'll keep going easy on it for a while anyway. :-/

Some discussion about the Game of Filthy Lucre

The Zen Habits blog had a "money hacks" post today:

http://zenhabits.net/2008/02/20-money-hacks-tips-and-tricks-to-improve-your-finances

and this is what I said in response to it.

There is a lot more to having a healthy relationship with money than just having more of it. Please don’t get me wrong — poverty is one of the worst things in the world, and to get out of it you need both good offense (making money) and good defense (not spending too much of it, which is what this post seems to be mostly about).

However, once you are at the point where money isn’t the limiting factor in life, there’s a whole new set of skills to be learned: how to invest instead of just letting money earn the amount to be had in a savings account, how to learn to LET yourself spend the amounts that are “safe” to spend instead of turning into a miser and never enjoying the fruits of all that scrimping and saving, how to use money for things that enhance happiness instead of simply piling up mounds of stuff, etc.

All the points in this post are essentially good points, in that they are helpful to some, and I’ve used variations on all of them over the years. However, some of them just stop making sense after a certain point. The “barter” technique doesn’t help anymore when time, not money, is the commodity that most limits your life. Cooking for oneself doesn’t help anymore when good food is available for free at work (granted, this one may only apply to a few people). Many people have already noted that using cash is a nice way to not earn interest on money, and it also keeps one from building up a good credit rating.

This post is nice as a beginning. I’d like to ALSO see one on how to live happily with money once one is above the poverty line.

I don't know if I said quite what I meant to say, but pretty close. Scrimping and saving will never get anyone the fiscal life of their dreams -- people imagine themselves "being rich", but I doubt they mean they want millions in the bank and a huge psychological block against spending more than $20 on groceries. Sometimes people say they want a large income, but I doubt they mean they want to live paycheck to paycheck with no security against the future, blowing through a million dollars every two weeks. No, living well with what you have is what's huge.

Offense: increase the amount you earn.
Defense: decrease the amount you spend.
Strategy: learn what to do with what you're not spending.
Tactics: learn how best to spend what you are spending.

Discuss?