not a complete success

No, I’m not referring to the new Vegemite, or even to the smarty-pants tourists who “killed off a rare species of shrimp by relieving themselves on Australia’s iconic Uluru, or Ayers Rock“.

Good one.

No, I’m talking about my alleged triumphal return to the world of running.

It ended up being yesterday lunch-time. An easy lap of the tan. So, how did it go?

Well, my legs remember how to run (I seriously feared they would forget). My lungs can basically do the job, although I’m still getting rid of my cough, and I’m not as fit as I once was.

The thing is, my “bits” seem to behave as if this was a new activity for them. It all felt decidedly odd during the run – but not painful – and afterwards I was swollen and blue and felt like I’d been kicked between the legs.

Not good.

I might have to stick to swimming for a little while.

Bloody, bloody, bloody operation.

triumphant return

I did intend to have a triumphant return to running yesterday. Truly, I did.

Sure, I’m more than a little bruised in the nether regions. Yes, I’m still coughing a fair bit. Despite all of that, I thought I should venture out for a little run.

But it wasn’t to happen – Melbourne decided to plunge back into deepest, darkest winter. Cold, wind, rain, it was all there. And I chickened out. Why go out and do something that’s probably going to leave you doubled over in pain, AND get wet at the same time?

So I went for a swim instead.

Still, it’s the first exercise I’ve done in 2 weeks, so a swim is better than nothing.

I’m planning a second attempt at a triumphant R. tonight.

Microsoft
For some reason, they had an article on the Guardian about the worst Microsoft ads ever. Geez, they’ve done some wierd stuff over the years. Check it out.

good news

It had to happen eventually, some good news about my so-called cancer. I think I may have given it away a bit there but never mind, pushing onwards.

I had an appointment today at the Repat to review the results of the operation last week. Basically, the tumour was attached to the testicle, which meant in almost all cases it would be a nasty, malignant cancerous one. However, my case was the one in a thousand of these tumours that is both connected to the testicle AND benign.

That doesn’t stop me hobbling around at the moment, or do anything about my “blue doodle”, but these will pass, as will the memory of the last month. It’s been a shit of a month, and not something I’m keen to experience again.

Have I learnt anything from the experience? Not sure.

I think I’ve learnt a bit about how to deal with doctors. I hate to break it to you medical professionals out there, but you don’t always know best, and you’re not always right.

Also, that first weekend when I was convinced I was going to die, I did the whole, “what if I only have 3 months to live?” thing. My conclusion was quite good: even if there were only 90 days left, I wouldn’t choose to do anything radically different to what I do now. I’d spend time with my kids and family, do a little work, stay as healthy and active as possible, read some good books and listen to good music. I’d probably cut down on the work hours a bit, and try to spend less time commuting. But that’s about it.

That either means my life is about where it needs to be, or that I’m just an extremely boring person with no imagination. For the sake of my self-esteem, I choose the former.

Thanks for all your thoughts and comments over the last month. It’s good to know I have some friends out there in cyberspace. I value it enormously, believe me.

cough, splutter, cough

I have a ragged sort of memory of Jeeves, somewhere in distant history, describing someone who was in the process of quitting smoking with the words “meloncholy claimed him for its own”.

I know the feeling.

At the moment, it’s not melancholy that’s claimed me, it’s a bloody chest cold. It grabbed hold last Wednesday, and it’s held on with a vice-like grip, long after the chills, the sweats and the aches have bid adieu. It’s not so much that I have a chest cold, more that it has me!

Let’s hope my doctor’s patented mix of antibiotics will do the trick. He tells me it’s his special mix, and who am I to doubt him?

To be honest, I suspect he’s more than a little of a freak, that doctor. He thinks all French people are evil and can’t do athletics. The two go together apparently. He told me this at great length today at our consultation. I kept making subtle hints, like standing up and moving towards the door, but that wouldn’t shut him up, the bugger.

If it does shift (the cold) I might go for a run soon. I took the dog for a 5km run last night, including a couple of running spells. No harm done.

That’s conditional on tomorrow’s appointment at the Repat in Heidelberg. Hopefully they’ll tell me everything’s A-okay on the cancer front.

heart attack burger

This video is only about 3 seconds long, but I think on it’s own it’s enough to give you a heart attack, or certainly clog up a few arteries. No need to actually eat the thing.

It’ll definitely put you off your dinner.

God bless America.

Operation
The hospital have contacted me asking if they can use my pathology sample for research. (I said yes.) What they HAVEN’T done is tell me what the actual results were. And I have called, but no-one I can speak to knows, or will tell me, and the people who do know are always unavailable.

I have to wait until Thursday for that. Not only that, but I have to go to the bloody Repat, and sit around for 3 hours in a shitty waiting room with a hundred other sad-sacks.

T-bloody-riffic.

Ultimate Fighting Championship is the stupidest sport ever

There are only a few sports I genuinely enjoy watching and fewer I actually play.

I was mulling this over last night when I should have been sleeping and I’ve come to a conclusion. In general, the simpler the premise behind a sport, and therefore the easier it is to explain to a complete novice, the better it is. Here are some examples:

Rugby
Take a bunch of big beefy blokes with no necks, give them a ball shaped like an egg so they can’t bounce, kick or catch it with any great confidence, have them run forward, but only allow them to throw it backward. Then at seemingly random intervals have them link up ear to hip with one another in a sweaty battering ram and push the other team around in a circle.

That’s my huge simplification of the “sport”. The reality is far more complicated, but in such a tedious way, I could scarcely begin to explain. It’s mystifying, it really is. Then they start saying things like “Rugby – the game they play in heaven”. No kidding. If that’s what they play in heaven, I don’t want to go.

Netball
A nice, simple game completely ruined by a bunch of stupid, arbitrary rules. Can anyone explain to me why you can only take 2 steps? What’s the point?

Golf
Take a long, skinny stick, whack a little white ball for hundreds of metres and somehow get it to land in a little white cup in the ground. Sounds simple, but it’s not. No thanks.

Soccer
A round ball, a rectangular field with a goal at either end. Two teams of 11 players on the pitch. The objective is to get the ball into the opposition’s goal, using your feet, legs, chest or head (but no hands).

Genuinely simple, eh? And the result: it’s a game loved around the world, and known universally as “the beautiful game”.

V8 supercars
Take 2 lots of popular Australian-made family cars, hot them up and gut them and give them to a bunch of morons with monobrows called Garth who like to wear badges on every square inch of their clothing, to drive around in a circle for 12 hours at a time.

Another pretty simple idea, but not simple enough. I have a sneaking suspicion the whole thing’s a front for the alcohol industry. If you’re sitting around on the side of Mount Panorama for a whole weekend, what else is there to do but get completely shit-faced?

Cricket
Cricket is the kind of thing no-one but the English could invent, and even then only the idle aristocracy from a certain period in history when young men had plenty of time to spend lolling around in a laudanum-induced stupor pretending to be shepherds. You need a life-long education to understand the game, and two lifetimes worth of indoctrination to care.

(I do care, strangely).

Athletics
Most athletic events are pretty simple concepts, when you think about it, which generally means they hold up well. Running, swimming and most cycling events can be summed up in 12 words: start from point A, proceed to point B faster than anyone else.

Cycling is the only one of these three to go a bit off the rails, and only really on the track, where they have events like the “Keirin”, which, if I understand it correctly, involves riding for 1500 metres as slow as possible without actually falling over before doing the last 50 metres at a hundred miles an hour. It’s not great television, it’s not great sport: it’s just not great.

The field events seem to be mainly about throwing things as far as possible -sometimes yourself – up, down, sideways or all of the above. That’s okay, I suppose, but I can’t get too excited about it. I’ve never needed to throw a hammer, and I can only imagine a limited range of situations when the ability to throw a spear 100 metres across a field would come in handy.

Ultimate fighting championship
Based on my theory, this idea should be a winner. It’s about as simple an idea as you could possibly get: put two guys in a cage, as naked as possible, and let them beat living hell out of each other however they want to. See: www.ufc.com.

It’s not clever; it’s not nice; it hardly speaks to the best side of human nature, but there’s an admirably primal simplicity to the concept.

So the show (it’s on TV now, on One digital) should be a winner. But why doesn’t it work?

The devil’s in the detail, as usual. Firstly – all the fighters seem to wear long board shorts, and that’s about it, as if they’ve just come from the beach. How can you take some dorky surfer seriously as the “Ultimate fighting champion”?

Then there’s the fights themselves. The fighters can do literally anything they want to in there. They can kick, punch, scratch, spit, use cutting sarcasm, do the pile-driver, whatever: it’s limited only by your imagination. But all they end up doing is 2 minutes of half-hearted kick-boxing before they both fall to the floor in an uncomfortable embrace that looks as close to homosexual sex as you’re likely to see on TV. (It’s strange how you can watch two blokes attempt to maim one another, but not play hide the sausage).

This goes on for a couple of minutes until one of the fighters realises he’s inextricably tied in some nasty knot and yells “uncle” or something.

My point is: if you’re going to call your show “Ultimate Fighting Championship”, you need to do a little better than a little low-key wrestling.

Last night, however, I did see a “good” bout. It was good, in the sense it was so awful I could barely tear away my eyes. There were two young blokes, wailing on each other (I believe that’s the correct term) for 5 minutes at a time, only stopping to high-five one another if they felt one of them had gotten in a good hit.

Psychos.

Then, just when it couldn’t get any more exciting, Fighter A landed a monster punch on Fighter B’s chest which literally broke 3 ribs at once – you could see his chest cave in. “A” decided to press home his advantage, and advanced on the hurting B with murderous intent, only to be knocked out cold by a surprise right hook to the chin.

It’s stupid, violent, nasty, low-rent stuff. Possibly the worst sport ever. In short, it’s perfect for TV.

AFL
I predicted a Geelong win last night, and for once I was right. AJH has asked me to predict another win for the Cats this weekend. I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, Andrew. I picked them last year, and look what happened then!

Besides, my tipping is based on a pretty simple, but unarguable idea: if a team has won a lot of games in the recent past, they’re probably pretty good. If they’ve lost a lot of games, they probably suck. Neither of Geelong of St Kilda suck to any great extent, but I’m told St Kilda won more games than anyone else this season, so they’ll probably win.

So there.

ACMI
We (my family) headed into the city today to hang out at ACMI. The kids weren’t all that impressed with the video games and were scared by the Bananas in Pyjamas. My wife, however, had to be physically dragged away from the Wii machine, even after I pointed out she had been beaten into 11th place by a 4 year-old.

They had a few cool things: an illusion using rotating toys and a strobe light, and a machine that did Matrix-style animations. Here’s my attempt: www.acmi.net.au.

Sorry for the long post. Verbal diarrhea.

the things kids say, and why I can never show my face at childcare again

You’ll be pleased to hear my mood has lightened a little from the deep dark blackness of my last post. It’s now merely a somber grey, with fleeting hints of rainbows somewhere in the distance.

I’m still sore, bruised and swollen, and I’m still sick with the flu, but the worst of it has passed by now.

As always, the key to lightening my mood lay in exercise. This morning I did the first thing even remotely resembling exercise in a week – walking the dog. The dog looked at me a couple of times as if to say “Get a move on, man. I don’t have all day. And quit walking like a pirate”.

She would never say such a thing, of course. Buffy (the dog) is a sweet-natured thing who would never say so much as a mean word, even if she could talk. Which she can’t.

I’ve long held the belief that a good crisp bracing 10km run can cure most of what ails you, and I was tempted to put that belief into practice today. Sadly, a few aches and pains downstairs in the post dog-walk era suggested that wasn’t the best idea.

The things kids say
My 3 year old son knows about my operation. Not much, but enough to stop him doing disastrous running jumps onto my lap. Like all 3 year-olds, he hasn’t quite grasped the concept of tact, though. On Thursday, when he was a childcare, he told everyone who would listen – the workers, the kids, the manager, the parents:

My Daddy has a blue doodle

I can clearly never show my face there ever again.

But at least I can laugh about it, which means things must be on the improve.

Football
It’s about an hour before the final between Collingwood and Geelong. I have little knowledge or interest in the game, usually, and I have a long record of picking these things wrongly, but that being said: I predict Geelong to win in a dominant display of wet weather football.

this is a low

This is a low is the name of a Blur song, and not even a particularly good one at that, but the phrase has stuck with me down the years. I woke this morning with it on the tip of the tongue.

I should apologize in advance for the level of self-pity. I’m feeling a bit low this morning.

The night of the operation was okay. I was doped up on panadeine forte and indulging in an orgy of social media (I believe I even tweeted). Yesterday was also fine. I sat around at home, reading the paper and catching up on some novels in the sunshine. Downstairs was bleeding and sore, but bearable.

This morning, however, I woke with a shitty cold, caught from my son. Also, the area around the operation is swollen to double or triple its normal size. And sore. And purple.

What’s worse is any remaining numbness has long worn off, and I can begin to feel empty down there.

I know I’ll feel better soon, and this will all be forgotten, but just the same: this is a low.

My way of dealing with all this is to finally have a shower, and wipe off the last remnants of the operation – the arrow painted on my left leg in black texta, pointing up. I’m also drinking tea and listening to some beautiful old songs – Mama you’ve been on my mind, and Farewell Angelina, by Bob Dylan.

My wife and I were thinking of going out to the movies later on. I hope I feel better by then.