Learning to walk again

Since I started working out at the gym I've been getting more and more nagging injuries. First my foot started hurting so much I was on a cane for two weeks. Then an old wrist injury started acting up all the time. I strained some muscles in my chest so much I couldn't sleep for two days and this week my knees feel arthritic when I walk down stairs.

So today when Trainer made me do squats and I couldn't finish them because my knees hurt too much, he taught me how to walk.

Apparently I've been standing wrong, walking wrong, climbing stairs wrong, sitting wrong. When I walk up stairs I never put my heel down. When I walk down stairs I land on my joints, not my muscles. When I stand I lean and slouch on one foot, and when that foot gets tired I rest my upper body on my wrist.

All my weight is supported completely wrong and always has been, and only when I started getting stronger and more athletic did it start to cause me problems. That, and I got older.

So now when I stand and when I walk up and down stairs I have to concentrate like a little kid learning to move.

And it got me thinking - how often do we learn the wrong way by instinct? How often do we think we know something so well, and it turns out we've been doing it wrong all along?

We tend to be so used to the way we do things that we refuse to change when something's not working and it ends up crippling us.

I think this applies to writing too. I think whatever way we first learn to write - that's how we think we have to write forever.

I can't tell you how many essays I've read that began with a question, or how many stories I've read that began with an unattributed quote. Someone, somewhere taught my students that you should open with a question or a quote so they just keep on using that method until the end of time.

You could say the same thing about the Syd Field method, I think. Some people learn the three-act structure and that's what they stick with until the end of time. Some people start with McKee. Some people adore Blake Snyder. And all of these men are perfectly intelligent men with well developed theories that work for beginners, but I feel sometimes like there are writers who don't know how to move beyond the way they learned in the beginning.

I'm not sure if this applies to me or not, but I haven't changed my process too much so I'm going to think about giving it a shot and see what happens.

That's just sort of one of the things I started thinking about after I got annoyed from having to focus on climbing stairs.

The failure of Operation GTTMPAIRMZS

Trainer got a new client a couple of months ago. New client is a literary agent. So Trainer and I concocted a plan.

This is what Trainer was supposed to say:

"Hey, you know I have a client who wrote a zombie script and she keeps telling me how worried she is that no matter how strong her script is no agent will want to look at it because it's about zombies so they'll assume it's a B horror film when it's really a big budget action script. What should I tell her?"

I know, right? Eh? Come on, gimme some credit for that. That's good manipulative material right there.

Because at this point Potential Agent will say "Ooh, that sounds interesting. I'd love to read a big budget zombie action movie! Tell her to send it to me! Here's my card!"

And yaaaaaaay Emily gets an agent!

So here's what Trainer actually said:

"Hey, you know I have a client who's trying to be a screenwriter. What advice can you give her to get her story out there?"

So there went that cunning plan. Next time I'm writing it down.

Her advice, as it turned out, was to go to pitch fests. I find this difficult to hear because I've always been very anti-pitch fest. They take your $300 and out you in a room with hundreds of other desperate people and you all launch your stories at the agent who would most likely enjoy being anywhere else other than here right now. And somehow that's supposed to be your big break? Pfffft.

And she told Trainer that yes, most of the pitches are bad. And yes, only a tiny fraction of them ever lead to anything. But she also said a tiny fraction of them do. And if you've got a great pitch that stands out among the tumbleweeds then you might just break through the barrier.

Of course, all this was told to me via Trainer, and we've seen how well he listens.

I still don't know. Maybe I'll do the pitch fest at the next Expo. We'll see. Any of you guys have stories with pitching at these things?

I still don't believe in them, but Operation Get Trainer To Manipulate Potential Agent Into Reading My Zombie Script (GTTMPAIRMZS) failed miserably, so I guess I might as well give a pitch fest a shot.

Women be shoppin'

It turns out the reason I had to walk with a cane was because my shoes are practically soulless. The devil is in them. Did you know that you have to replace shoes every now and then? Even if they don't have holes in them?

Trainer ordered me to get new shoes this weekend so I can get my ass back up and running and stop using foot pain as an excuse for avoiding exercise.

I went to the Nike store at the Grove today expecting to pay $70 or $80 for new running shoes that would be an investment in my poor pained feet.

First of all, I discovered that my feet have gone down half a shoe size. How does that happen? I suspect, though, that whatever bizarre genetic freak out my feet are having may also be part of the reason I'm feeling pain when I run. My shoes are too big.

The sales girl handed me the nicest, most cushiony, arch protecting, ankle cradeling, air ventilating pair of shoes on earth to try on first. Bitch.

They were glorious. And perfect. And I felt like I was running on a layer of firm down pillows. Plus, they were blue.

Every other shoe I tried on after that was insignificant because I had fallen in love. Just like that first true love makes every other man you meet a complete let down, I didn't want those crappy second-best shoes I might have loved enough had I only tried them on first. I wanted the good stuff.

How much did this fantastic pair of shoes cost, you might ask? $130.

So I have no money now. Immediately after I bought the shoes I went to the grocery store and invested in lots of sandwich meat and carrots. It's a steady diet of turkey sandwich for the next couple of weeks. I might splurge and have spaghetti on Tuesday.*

I think I'll call the power company and explain to them that I would have paid my electricity bill, but the money is on my beautifully comforted feet. So worth it.

*There is a slight possibility I might be hyperbolating

How I got my wedding dress

I'm waiting for Mom to get back from Curves so we can go get the wedding dress to take it to the resale place. They were really excited to hear we were coming. I think most of the dresses they get are Aunt Tilda's thirty-year-old poofy sleeve number from her second marriage. Maybe that means I'll get more money.

Mom tried to get me to go to Curves with her. No thanks. If my workout's gonna be dictated to me it will be by supremely hot Trainer who occasionally can be coaxed to lift up his shirt and show me his abs, not by sixty year old ladies in sweatpants who believe every woman on earth has the same body.

Anyway, now seems as good a time as any to explain what happened with the wedding. I met Ex-Fiance while I was working for a horrible newspaper in eastern North Carolina. He was working for one of our competitors as a news reporter. I thought he was cute. We dated.

Then I decided to move back to Raleigh and become a teacher and I figured that was that because I wasn't interested in a long term relationship.

But he kept sticking around. He came up on weekends and sometimes I went down to visit on weekends and that was the pattern we adopted. I had no friends where I lived and everybody at work was married and older so there was no alternative. That's life in North Carolina for me. Ex-Fiance's friends were my only friends.

Time passed. Years passed. We downed massive amounts of wine on the weekends and ate at the same pizza restaurant. We played Knights of the Old Republic on X-Box.

Then I decided to move to LA to become a screenwriter. I asked if he wanted to come with me because I was afraid of moving alone. He responded by asking me to marry him.

We were on a trip to New York to stay with friends. We walked to Central Park, one of his favorite places on earth but a place that means absolutely nothing to me, and he pulled out a claim check for a jewelry store and popped the question casually.

I thought he was joking at first, but then said yes because that's what you do. You say yes. It's not like there was anybody else out there trying to marry me. I was used to him.

The ring was my great grandmother's. He had gone to my mother and gotten it, but it had no stones so he took it to the only jeweler in town who would put stones in it (there were better jewelers twenty miles away), but the jeweler got sick so Ex didn't have it when we went to New York, hence the claim check. When I did get the ring back the amethyst in the middle (my idea) was deeply flawed and one of the braces holding in a tiny diamond on the side was not properly set so it kept picking at my clothes. I was always having to dig pieces of lint out of my ring.

Kind of symbolic, no?

The night we got engaged his favorite basketball team got into the final four. When everyone told him congratulations he thought they were talking about the game.

Then we moved to LA. I paid for the move. I paid for the apartment. For four months I paid all the bills. He never could seem to find a job. He kept saying he was looking for one but wasn't satisfied with anything less than news reporter, even temporarily, so while he drank more and more and went out to hockey games I laid on the couch, exhausted from working at a school that didn't yet have its shit together so I could pay both of our bills.

I'd get up at 3 am to go to the bathroom and he'd be on my computer playing some video game where you conquer other cultures.

I dreaded sex.

Then I started to make friends. I went to the gym and got First Trainer. I was at the gym as much as possible because I didn't want to go home.

Because of First Trainer, I cut way back on the drinking. Then I told Ex I'd like him to go a week without drinking. He agreed. I marked the bottle. The very next day after he promised to stop there was less vodka in the bottle. I confronted him. He said it must have evaporated. I marked it again. The next day there was MORE vodka in the bottle than before.

He's not too bright.

One day two months before my wedding I was addressing envelopes for the wedding invitations while watching TV. I saw that credit card commercial where that girl in her wedding dress runs and hugs her friends because she's so happy.

"What an idiot," I said.

I looked down at the cards in my lap. I realized what I had just said. That's when I knew I didn't want to get married.

He didn't take it so well. Before he moved out he would get drunk in the middle of the night and come into the bedroom to demand to know why I wanted to break it off. He finally moved out.

He took me to lunch a few months later to catch up. We were going to try to be friends. When the bill came he discovered he had no money. I paid.

It's the last time I paid for anything. I haven't seen him since.