Thursday, September 18, 2008

Lovin' Every Minute of It

When the company I work for moved offices, we were all pretty excited about being in a new and much more spacious space. Our old place was just unimpressive, and in the entertainment biz you gotta entertain by being impressive. And the new place is indeed impressive, as shown by our massively huge and successful first real party last Friday night. Not much elbow room on your way to the bar, which is usually my measuring stick of the popularity of a joint.

Anyway, back to the new space: The one major drawback of this new awesome office is that there's not much in the way of parking. There's enough for the clients, but not the employees, so us worker bees park in the Yahoo lot which is at best a 7 minute walk. In order to dramatically reduce the time of said walk, I bought a skateboard. Actually Judah convinced me to buy a skateboard in the Sports Authoritie when we were really there to buy him some shoes. He just wouldn't let it go, so I let my inner child do the decision making, and we walked out of there with a skateboard in a box. How un-punk.

Cutting to the chase of this story (cuz I like short blogs - and short songs):
I'm feeling pretty good about my skateboarding to and from the parking garage, in spite of the fact that I hadn't really ridden a skateboard in about 20 years. This good feeling vanishes shortly after getting on the board one morning and wiping out and transforming the heel of my left hand into road burn/hamburger with a swift and stinging wipeout. Gross enough that I wondered if it would ever go back to normal.

I wore a bandage on the hand for a couple weeks and it was starting to look presentable enough that I could lose the bandage. So I did. And a couple days later, I was pan frying pork chops on the stove and managed to spill some nice hot oil on the thumb and index finger of that same hand. The burning sensation lasted for 4 hours, even with repeated slatherings of aloe. The next day there was (and still is) a pretty massive blister covering the area between the joints in my index finger. I wanna pop it, but Lily won't let me. I'd take a picture, but I like you too much.

So today we had a little meeting at Judah's new preschool, and as usual, I'm either late or I'm stressing that I will be late, so I grab the trusty skateboard to speed to the parking garage. And as you might guess by where this is all heading, I managed to wipe out in the crosswalk and scraped the hell out of (you guessed it) my left hand. Looking good, kid. My left hand is disgusting. And I can't really feel the heel of my hand anymore. I mean I can feel it with my right index finger, but on my left hand it feels dead.

I get to the preschool meeting (10 minutes ahead of schedule) and make a beeline for the bathroom so I can wash the blood off, but it doesn't really come off because it's embedded into the scraped heel of my hand. But when I get into the meeting and as I'm sitting there listening to Judah's new teacher, I glance down at my scraped up left hand and think: "I love skateboarding."