Here we are mid-October. My thirteen-year old nephew is playing fall ball, the fall baseball league for middle-school boys. On the league are all the boys who have chosen not to play football, and so my nephew is hitting clean up and batting somewhere in the 800's, at least according to his somewhat suspicious calculations. (He tried to explain to me how he got a triple in his last game without making contact with the ball or any errors on the part of the other team.)

My two youngest nieces, eight and five, are cheerleaders for the first time. The eight-year old cheers and though she does not seem to be the master of voice projection, she is proficient at the attitude and head-snap of much older cheerleaders. The five year old is really too young to cheer, but they put her on the squad as mascot and she has a sweatshirt and gets to shout and clap alongside the older girls.

My eldest niece, a junior in high school, does not leave her room without a book and a pen. The weather has cooled enough where I finally feel confident enough to put my window air conditioners in storage and an extra blanket on the bed. Mister President wakes up a half-hour earlier, prancing and anxious to experience the morning at it's chilliest. A sweater, thin jacket and scarf are adequate to keep one warm and stylish. That's all to say, things seem right and fall-like to me. Fall is good. Fall is great.

During triathlon training last year (which feels like a few lifetimes ago) a friend gave me a piece of advice before my first race of the season: when you're in the race, she said, keep reminding yourself about how good you're feeling, even when you're not feeling that good. Say to yourself, "Feeling good? Feeling great! Feeling good? Feeling great!" It sounds hokey, but it got me up and over some insane hills in those insane races. And I'm thinking of that today, not because I'm considering ever training or participating in a triathlon again—those days are long gone—and not because I need to push myself through back pain. I'm chanting that simply because, one week after back surgery, I'm not only feeling good, I'm feeling great.

Can it really be over a month since the last post? Meaning, can it really be over a month and my back continues to nag and nag and nag? But here I go feeling sorry for myself again. The only thing I seem to be good at these days.

In late February, my back started to feel slightly better. My attitude improved. In mid-March, my back started to feel a lot worse. I fell into another depression. Overall, it's the same and I'm not good at judging small increments. I've stopped getting my hopes up after one good evening where my hips look almost straight. I've stopped thinking I feel up to a ten minute walk because I've been inside for two days and not in too much pain. Three blocks, and there's the pain. I felt okay yesterday. I was able to walk from my office on 14th and 6th to physical therapy on 23rd and Park. That's the longest walk I've taken in three and a half months. Victory?

It's Monday morning. Outside the bent slats of my office blinds (they came with the apartment), I have a ground floor view of S-- Street—cars parked curbside, a wrought iron fence capped with pointy iron maple leafs that stakes off the small rectangle area at the front of the house, blue and green emptied garbage cans at the curb, and the brownstones across the street—not the fancy kind, but the flat-fronted ones with concrete steps and average-sized windows. The gray one across the street has a white gate and a statue of a Catholic saint wearing orange robes in the corner of the front yard. A typical, working class street in Brooklyn, except this morning it's a little whiter. The hood and windshield of the Jeep parked out front has a sheen of frost, and the sidewalks are white, at least on my side of the street, which is still in shade. A dusting of snow that stayed, and it feels so normal to look out on a wintery scene in January, for my feet to feel a little cold as I write, to consider soup for lunch, and keep my sweater on indoors. It's about time.

Two weeks and two days ago, I stepped out of the shower to find I couldn't put any weight on my right foot without a searing pain that started in my lower back on the right side and radiated down to my toe and up to my shoulder blade and out through my abdomen. I also could not stand straight or move very much without the same pain. Since then, an MRI revealed that I have a herniated disk that's pressing on a nerve, as well as disk dessication (dryness), bulging and degeneration, which all sounds pretty bad. Except save for the herniation, these maladies are not all too uncommon for people over 30. So is the herniated disk what's causing all the pain that refuses to respond to acupuncture, muscle relaxants, massage and every other technique I throw at it, and makes it difficult to stand straight and walk all this time later?

Still on the hunt for a miracle cure for my back pain, one that will have me leaping off the examination table rather than rolling, pushing and gnashing my teeth off of it, I decided to give the one thing I had yet to try a shot--acupuncture. One look at my crooked hips and Frankenstein hobble and people were eager to share the names of all the acupuncturists they worshipped throughout the city. I was grateful for all the advice, but having already spent a good amount of time and money on this problem without relief--a moist heating pad, a back brace, three visits to the doctor, prescriptions, and countless cab rides--I decided to go with the cheapest acupuncturist who also worked on Saturday and did not require an appointment. I went deep into Chinatown to Linsister.

Before going to get my first MRI this morning, I got a lot of advice. Most commonly: "Whatever you do, do not open your eyes." Why, I wondered. Was it because the gargantuan magnet used in MRIs would cause instant and irreperable damage to my corneas? Would I be able to resist opening my eyes after having been warned so vehemently by so many? The do not open your eyes advice was not about damage to the corneas, but a way to stave off the extreme claustrophobia laying in a tube only a few centimeters wider than your own diameter might provoke. We're talking eyelash-touching closeness type of claustrophobia. My chiropractor's advice, a man who does not believe in prescription meds: "Pop a muscle relaxant right before you go in." The other thing I was told was that it's loud. Bang bang bangety bang. Really, really loud. What was I getting myself into and did I need to carry a shot of cyanide in case things went really badly?

Lying on the floor with my head resting on two bedpillows smashed against the legs of the couch, my feet up on a dining room chair and the moist heat of a heating pad (very important for it to be moist) toasting my lower back, it's easy to forget that I can't simply sit up when I need to go to the bathroom or answer the phone or measure the exact width of my living room. Instead, when the urget to move occurs, I need to begin ever so gently, bring both legs to the chest, roll my entire body to my left side and try hard to remember which moves will get me on my feet and which ones will send a brief, arresting shot of pain through my lower back. Do I put my hands down and push up? Is it easier to roll up from the left or right? When can I put weight on my feet? Never, ever move the neck out of line or let it drop when attempting to get up.

I've discovered my threshold for pain and it is about three days, three hours and forty-eight minutes. On the morning of New Year's Eve, after stepping out of the shower, the muscles in my lower back contracted into a tight spastic knot. In seconds, I went from being able to towel off, get dressed and walk upright to requiring assistance to make it the ten feet back to bed, and when I got there, I fell flat on my face and wept. This was not my threshold for pain. This was only the beginning.

With triathlon season well behind me, and having given up the notion that I'd put in even five hours a week to maintain any level of fitness in the off-season, I find myself with time. It's a glorious amount of time. There is no pressure to fit in one or two workouts a day, no packing of clothes, no heaps of extra laundry and only a minor lump of guilt to deal with and a daily gut pinching to measure the growth of the bulge. With all this extra time, I could be getting so much done, but it's the opposite. My productivity lessens exponentially to the amount of time I have. What I have been doing is reading, finishing the weekend New York Times crossword puzzles and walking the dog.

Since the weather's been so indisputably fine (ah, fall), the dog requires two generous walks a day, and stores in the neighborhood seem to be courteous to canine customers, I decided to make one of Mister President's evening walks last week a book shopping excursion. There's a small bookstore on Court Street called Book Court that I especially like, maybe because they specialize in fiction or because Mister President is allowed to browse the entire store rather than confined to the area that does not serve food. It's also small, but abundant and well-organized, with a shelf of staff picks and a warm, inviting display window that, if it had a smell, would be of warm gingerbread.

As the water cools across the East Coast, triathlon season dwindles and by early October, comes to a quiet close. The rest of my season? I'm doing a sprint-distance this weekend, which is more like a long workout than an actual race. You register the day of the race, no racing numbers to pin on, no marker on the arms and thighs, no timing chip and no hills. That's my kind of tri. And I'm considering traveling to Phoenix in late October to visit my sister and compete in a Quarterman (that's got a nice ring, no?), but that depends how the my hip/thigh feels on the run this weekend. And that concludes the season. Mentally and physically, I'm ready for a break. Tennis and ballet sound really good to me right now. I'm also feeling a little beefy in the arms and legs, not what I'd been going for at the start of all this.

1. The woman down the hall. She lives with her door mostly open and has frequent and loud arguments with nobody in particular. Her haunts include: the garbage closet, located next to my apartment door, to discard handfuls of garbage (crumpled paper and dirty tissues) on the floor and never down the chute; the corner deli, back and forth, in and out, all day long, having heated, exasperated conversations with noone in particular. She is in her mid-forties or early fifties. She wears plain cotton blouses, black pants and low, comfortable heels. She dies her hair red. She disappears every few months and when she comes back, it takes about a month for her to build back up to her old self.

I'm thinking it's more situational than the music itself. Like, what was going on in your life when these songs came to you is what makes them emotionally resonant. Or the attachments you formed to the songs way back when is what triggers in you, listening to them now, when you're life is so different, changed from all the choices you've made, a feeling, a longing that turns your insides into balls of putty.

The last entry made me think of other songs. Songs that can get me in the gut given the right mood and situation. Here are the ones I can think of right now, in no particular order and many of them quite embarrassing. (Although listing them is taking away some fo their potency, I can tell already.) What are yours?

Let's begin with an excuse. Let's follow it with a rambling. There aren't many days I feel like I have an experience worth blogging. Thus, not much blogging. This is one of those days.

I'm not working anymore, at least not in the nine to five sense. I wake up early, respond to some emails, leave others for later so that I have a small sense of guilt nibbling me through the rest of the day, make breakfast and coffee. I have laundry to do. I need to buy half and half. (If you don't know me, you're asleep or onto something else by now. You won't check this blog again.) This morning I read a friend's blog that sent me reeling into a sentimental musical journey and an hour of downloading old music. Ned's Atomic Dustbin churns up sobs inside me.

This is what unemployment allows you to do with your days. Aimless meanderings of the mind. What I'm really doing is waiting for the dog to wake up and whine to go outside. What I'm not doing is revising a story.

I don't know why, but writing a Personal Statement, the kind required for college appliations, has always tormented me. Which is funny because it's sort of what I'm doing each time I post to this blog, writing a personal statement of some sort. But when it comes down to having to write one on topic for an application that requires me to stand out from the thousands of other applicants in 500-1000 words, be funny and clever and leave the reader with a lasting impression, I tense up. I freeze. I utterly choke.

Why am I rambling about personal statements? An old friend came to visit this weekend with two in her bag. She was helping friends get through their graduate application process. She asked if I wouldn't mind commenting on them. Mind? Have the chance to see other people suffer through drafts of what I've never been able to do myself? (Or what I hoped would be suffering, terrible, rotten essays.) My pleasure.

This morning a friend sent me a New York Times article on the topic of downloading free music. How it's not against the law, no matter what the record labels and other warlords of copywrite infringement would have us believe. But isn't it just another thing to be afraid of in this terrorist-ridden, civil liberty-less, GW Bush version of a pariotic world? I digress.

Thanks to the article, and a temporary job that is laid back, I've been epitonicized. I'm spending the day listening to bands that I otherwise never would have heard of. Did you know that Mooney Suzuki is made up of the four coolest guys in NYC? Well I didn't.

The usually vacant look of our president in any picture is enough to make me laugh (unless he's re-elected, then I'm not laughing anymore), but the picture of his face on this $200 bill tops even the George W. Bush doing aerobic gyrations in a tank top I saw earlier this week. But the best part of the story is that the counterfeiter wasn't making a political statement. She actually passed off the bill at a local Fashion Bug. I had to look twice to make sure I wasn't reading this in the Onion. Oh my god. Does it get better than this? Fashion Bug declined to comment.

I've never attended a protest before. I've never been politically motivated enough or had a strong enough opinion one way or another for a politician or a political parties' agenda to get out there and shout. But here I am on a ninety plus degree day in August ready and willing to join the thousands (or hundreds of thousands?) of others in a march against Bush. I don't know if I'll actually shout, but I am dressed for the occasion. Unfortunately, it's too hot and crowded to bring along the candidate that I'm pulling for.

Punxsatawney Phil says that we have six more weeks of winter, which to me sounds like good news even though it's supposed to mean the opposite. Six more weeks is a breeze. Six more weeks means that we won't be spending June wearing sweaters huddled beneath umbrellas like last June. Does anyone recall last June, the month mistaken for Summer?

I've read Proust. I can say that now. Okay, so millions of people can say that now. What I'd rather be able to say that I've read Proust, understand Proust and can eloquently speak about Proust. (I can't.) And it's not like I read him in his native language or intend to read further in the one book of an 11-volume series that I did attempt (made it halfway by assignment not choice). And would I have made it more than 10 pages without assignment? I guess that's what grad school is all about.

My first assignment was to write like Proust. A Proustian extended metaphor, Proust style. It's convoluted and long. Does that mean I succeeded?

I spent it on bike. First to Central Park where I did the loop twice trying to ignore the mad, geared out cyclists. They wear racing colors, shave their skin smooth and have muscles that grow at sharp angles. They pass me with ease.

Purchases since last post (most recent first):
1. Bubble Tea
2. Salad & cookies
3. Muffin & coffee

Walking through the downtown area, can't help but wonder if there are a dwindling number of days that this will all still be here. And then I chide myself for thinking so. The metropolis.

Today I learned that what we westerners know as Chilean Sea Bass is really a fish from the subantartic called a Patagonian toothfish. Wonder why you never saw that on the menu.

The end of a pleasantly reclusive weekend. The rain a perfect backdrop for reclusion. But I did see friends.

A friend from DC who appreciates my stories and I hers. We talked at impossible lengths of relationships, family, relationships, the future.