I'm Injured

Here's a little tip: If you're going to sprain your foot/ankle while running down a flight of stairs, be sure to do so in the comfort of your own home. Or at least close to home, or someplace where people own and drive automobiles. Trust me on this. Don't get hurt when the specter of the Chinatown Bus looms in your near future, or when the F Train decides to stop running, or when every taxi cab in New York City is stuffed with tourists. Because when you disembark from the festering, hellacious Third World-on-wheels that is the Dragon Coach, when you find yourself on some esoteric Chinatown corner, and you've only got one usable foot and there's no way to get home, well then you my friend are royally screwed.

I've spent the last 2 nights plopped down on the couch with bags of frozen peas rubber banded around my ankle. I have absolutely no idea where to get a pair of crutches, other than from the hospital (and the thought of sitting in an emergency room in NYC is obviously worse than the pain of my injury). Seriously, where do you get crutches? A drugstore? The supermarket? Home Depot? eBay? I've got no freaking idea. Where the hell do people get those things?

So my normally decadent 3 block commute to work (which I highly recommend by the way. living further than 3 blocks from the office is for suckers) has evolved (devolved?) into a comedy of errors. My pace is about on par with that of your average garden slug. I've actually found myself clinging to scaffolding for support, which marks the second handy use I've found for the stuff -- the first being shelter from the rain. People are staring at me like I've just wandered out from the local leper colony. So I'm limping, is that such a crime? And yeah, I'm wearing flip-flops. I can't get a goddamn shoe on my foot. Whatta ya want from me? It's like there's a photographer from Vice Magazine lurking around every corner, waiting to pounce and turn me into a Don't (sorry for the 6 year old reference. do people still read Vice? does it still exist?). I am the walking, poorly dressed wounded.

An interest aside: so, my feet are abnormally white, right? Actually, my entire body is a bit on the, shall we say, non-tan side. But my feet haven't seen the sun in years. They're sort of cadaver-esque, I suppose. ANYWAY, every coworker I've encountered (which isn't many, actually, since I take great pains to avoid them) has delighted in ridiculing the pigment of my poor innocent footsies. Except, and get this (!): for the Indian girl with whom I share an office, who's done everything short of swooning at the sight of my milky white appendages. Seriously, she LOVES them. She has complimented me (repeatedly) on how white they are!!! To say nothing of the wonderful state of my toenails and tasteful, not-too-hairy tufts upon my toes. But it's the whiteness she's really taken with! Now, as someone as pale as I, this is quite a revelation. It's like discovering that a culture exists where the women pine for guys who are 5'9", have terrible hair, and sport rather large schnozzes. So, I press for details and it turns out that in India, the whiter the feet, the more attractive a person is considered to be. In fact, people BLEACH THEIR FEET to make them more white! What??? Jesus Christ, where has this information been my whole life? You mean to tell me I've spent 30 years cultivating a sense of humor, when I could have just bought a plane ticket and picked up women with my white feet? Good God!