The Tale of Two Ladies

Once upon a time, there was a young lady who was born despising the act of running. She used to do everything she could to avoid it. Even from a young age, she was adept at faking injuries in elementary school P.E. Oddly enough, this young lady's parents signed her up to play soccer - a sport full of running. Fortunately, she was junky enough at it that she only had to run at practices and could watch the games from the bench. Unfortunately, soccer participation was a foregone conclusion beginning at the age of six all the way until 17. That's a lot of practices requiring a lot of fake injuries.

As the young lady began to mature, she gained the ability to make decisions for herself. She began to see the merit in never running again. This looked especially attractive one day while she was hanging out with her friends and the soccer practice hour approached. She announced her intention to skip practice and remove herself from the act of running forever more. As the idea took shape in her mind, her much more responsible friends convinced her this was not the right way to go about pursuing running abstinence. She should not cut it off without a conversation with the coach (or parents).

So the young lady dragged her feet and went to the practice. Shockingly enough, the practice contained running. One excruciating drill in particular required an individual to run quickly to a line, turn around, run quickly back to the original line, turn around, run quickly to a further line, turn around, run quickly to the original line and so on. The non-politically correct 90s term for this exercise was "suicides."

Not surprisingly the young lady's quick runs were significantly slower than the rest of the team's. In fact, they all finished while she was still returning from her quick run. And would you believe it... on the return run, a clump of grass reached out and grabbed ahold of the young lady's foot and tossed her to the ground. No one really paid attention to her slow fall, or her subsequent slow rise. When she got up, there was some quick pain.

As the practice concluded and the young lady complained of lingering pain, and an inability to walk, her parent prescribed the ole RICE treatment (rest, ice, compression, elevation). Unfortunately, after three days, the young lady's leg was elephant-sized and magnificently colored. After finally going to the doctor, the young lady was amazed to discover her ankle was in fact broken. She managed to break her ankle while running alone at a slow pace, at a practice she wanted to skip.

Darn the luck.

Once upon a different time, there was a not-so-young lady who was born despising the act of cooking. She was forced to do it, because she had chronically hungry children and a spouse. Even from a young age, she was perpetually failing at recipes - both easy and hard. There were the chocolate chip cookies that somehow didn't have baking powder (or maybe it was baking soda - whatever it is that makes them not flat), the flat cake that weighed 15 pounds, the oatmeal cookies with broken glass in them, years and years worth of dry meat, endless amounts of flavorless, burnt crap. There was also the cherries she considered making into pie before she realized they were infected with tiny worms. Lucky for everyone, she is enormously paranoid about homegrown food (not to mention too lazy to pit cherries)...

Clearly the not-so-young lady needed some help. So she enlisted the help of a cooking class that turned out to be a rotund gentleman telling stories and forgetting any cooking supplies he was supposed to bring. She had hundreds of cook books (most bought tactfully by well-meaning friends/family). None of them worked.

Then one summer day, she found an online cooking class that taught her how to make a kind of salsa that required no actual cooking - just some blending and cutting. It could also withstand someone forgetting an ingredient that was supposed to be blended in the beginning, but had to be thrown in as an afterthought at the end.

It was like a miracle. She convinced her husband to cook some chicken (he somehow avoided that drying out problem). She microwaved tortillas in a towel that likely had lingering cat hair on it. The salsa and chicken taco was a major success. The not-so-young lady was stunned. She even had tears in her eyes (which may or may not have been caused by the onions). It seemed the bad luck was a thing of the past. From now on, they would eat salsa for every meal. It was especially good on chips.

Then the unthinkable happened. While vigorously shoveling chips and salsa into her mouth, the not-so-young lady felt a stinging shock of pain her wrist. She cried out, alarming the other salsa-eating kitchen patrons. She had sustained some kind of injury. It was the kind that would not allow her to rotate her wrist without nearly screaming. She cradled her wrist in her lap with some ice her child had gathered for her, and went on eating the salsa with her other hand. She was intense. She was a fighter.

She may have done some kind of dislocation or tendon-slip to her wrist. She doesn't know which because she wasn't able to Google at that moment - with all that good salsa still to eat. Luckily she was able to summon her salsa-fueled strength and force her wrist to rotate, which caused a great deal of pain, followed by a pop and instant relief (also followed by some lingering soreness which causes typing to be slightly uncomfortable).

What kind of person injures their wrist whilst eating chips? The same kind who breaks their ankle whilst slow jogging through the grass, that's who.

Darn the luck, indeed. I'm a salsa specialist (for only one kind of salsa, and likely just for today).