Thursday, May 9, 2013

(Mostly) Not About Camera Apps

My body is a thing right now.  It continues to be a thing.  I feel lost and confused, and I don't even know how to say what I don't know.  But my shin, my feet, they seem connected but might not be, and there are conflicting suggestions about what I should do about them, and I don't even know how to tell the difference between "healing" and "hurting."  And there are so many variables I don't know how to isolate what changes are causing what effects.  I have feelings in my body, but I don't know how to interpret them.  Most of them I've never felt before.

And some of those feelings are bad, shin-splint-y feelings, and some of them are strange and good, like this new craving I've been having to exercise.  Not in a "this will be good for me and I'll be glad when I'm done," kind of way, but a WANT kind of way.  I don't even know what to say about that.  Is this from my enforced absence from dance?  Is it just a strange new reaction to spring?  I hate being hot, but somehow the hot air makes me feel like exercising.  Sort of like, "I'm going to be miserably hot anyway, might as well go for it now?"  Is this the CPAP giving me the energy I never knew I had? 

Yesterday I had that need to exercise, and it took me a while to decide if I was going to Nia and/or Zumba or to the gym for the cardio machines.  Nia and Zumba are riskier for my leg, because the last time I tried them I could feel something happening in my shin or my arches that might be bad but I don't know.  I might injure myself if I do them.  I might help.  Going to the gym is safer on my body because I'm much more confident that walking and biking are low-stress and more likely to be beneficial to my leg.  It's just that going to the gym is riskier emotionally because it's new and strange and out of my comfort zone.

I decided on gym.  And as I was walking from the parking lot, someone passed me and called out "I love your tats."  Then he turned, looked me in the eye and said, "they're badass," and walked away. 

This guy was 6'3", muscled, and dressed for gym.  Guys who look like this are part of the reason I'm intimidated by gyms.  And this guy, who is confident where I am timid, he says I'm badass.  And you know what?  He's right.  If I can sit under a needle for 1 1/2 hours, I can sit on a bike for 30 minutes.  I can do things that are hard because I want to. 

And I did.  I worked out, and it felt good, and I didn't work very hard, but it felt like a good start.  Except that now I am contemplating what I will do today, and going through the same decision making processes: country dancing, hippy exercise dancing, or gym?  And I am sure that the right answer is the same as yesterday, that I should be minimizing the risk to my shin, at least until I have my scheduled meeting with the wellness coach at the end of the month, but every time I decide that I shouldn't dance, I am terrified and frustrated because I keep making that decision, long after it first happened, and it should be better now but I don't think it is, and I'm afraid that I'm never going to dance again.

Also, I realized that after that entire camera app search, I never once actually compared the photos from each app.  I looked at features and menus and file types, but have not yet done any image comparisons.  I kind of thought that image quality was a function of the camera, and not the software, but with a digital camera the two are completely intertwined.  Data needs to be interpreted, and different apps interpret differently.  So that's coming up, too.  It's going to be novel-length when I'm done which is funny considering that nothing I'm reviewing cost more than $3.

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