pain in the neck, part 2

And, my neck is better, a lot better, but still not great. My doctor said it's actually a lymph node causing the problem. It's probably related to allergies (too much time spent the past few weeks on the right coast) or quitting smoking, or both.

I was going to get a massage but have been super busy with work and in the one hour I had to potentially get a massage I decided to get my eyelashes dyed instead.

I hate make up. I can deal with a little pain as long as my eyes look good. When I get to Canada on Sunday I'll do a massage. Luckily my hotel has a spa.

big news

I quit smoking two weeks ago. I know, don't have heart failure.

I did it by buying a fake cigarette. I took a quiz on some website (it was like "you're going to die from lung cancer.org" or some name like that) that figured out what kind of smoker I am. It turns out I hate cigarettes (explaining why I always get pissed when someone smokes near me) but I like to smoke. Fake cigarettes make smoke and do all the things a normal cigarette does, but it doesn't cause you to get cancer. Stupidly, the FDA won't approve them as a smoking cessation tool because they think fake cigarettes will encourage kids to smoke.

?????

Anyway, I did a lot of research and bought fake cigarettes from V2. They are so cool. I love love love them. I have 4 different kinds and one that I can smoke in my car and one I can smoke from my laptop (it connects up through the USB port).

One downside is my voice is kind of screwed up right now and I lose my voice usually by mid-day. My doctor says it's a result of quitting smoking and that it should stop happening...soon. Yeah right. Like when my other doctor said my organs would take the place of my uterus and my abdominal cavity would stop filling with air every time I fly, causing me to fart for like 45 minutes straight after I get off of a plane. That was, what, 10 months ago. Still farting.

If you know anyone who needs to quit smoking check out V2. And do a search on reviews, there's all kinds of discount codes to save you money. Right now my "smoking" habit is costing about 25% of what my normal habit cost.

All savings are going toward paying for a new kitchen which I will hopefully start this summer. Which should be a disaster if it's like everything else I do...

pain in the neck

I woke up this morning at 4:30 after having a nightmare that someone had tried to saw my head off. Surprisingly, when I came fully to consciousness, I was still having severe pain in my neck.

I've never had a back or neck problem before. Sometimes they feel tweaky, but nothing worth writing a blog about. This morning was different. I couldn't find a single position to put my head in that didn't hurt. I kept getting spasms that were so painful I felt like throwing up.

I have no idea what happened. When I went to bed last night I felt fine. More than fine. I even did an extra set of pushups and rollups. Neither of those exercises has ever hurt my neck, even when I over do them.

Panicking because I had to teach today I hopped in the shower and sprayed hot water on my neck for over 30 minutes. No change. I could barely brush my teeth and had to keep my head bent to the right side (the pain is on the left). Also, I could not lift my head up straight so had to stare at the carpet while getting dressed; good thing I don't feel the need to look at my outfit before I go to the office.

I got to the customer site, walking with my heavy backpack on just my right shoulder and almost passing out on the sidewalk from the pain. My point of contact picked me up in the lobby and she was like "girl, what is WRONG with you?" The left side of my neck was spasming so badly that my students started joking that an alien was trying to pop out (it's that noticeable - the muscle along the left side of my neck is totally sticking out and swollen and when it spasms it sticks out even further). One concerned student even offered to bring me muscle relaxers tomorrow (yes, I've been counseled to not take other people's meds so I won't be taking them - but, for the record, I'm tempted).

After forcing myself to do head rolls during the lunch break (or, half rolls) I was able to at least lift my head to normal position. The spasms stopped. I'm still getting a shooting pain from my left shoulder blade to the top of my head.

I fucking better be okay tomorrow. It's sheer hell trying to teach and be on my feet all day when my neck hurts and I can't turn my head at all. Fuck knows what the students at my periphery are doing knowing I can't see them.

my brother and I solve some problems of the universe

I had a great evening with my brother Bob watching two shows, Super Massive Black Holes and Wormholes. My mom wanted to watch HGTV but we wouldn't let her.

During the show we came up with a theory based on those funnel shaped fountains that you drop a penny into and the penny rolls down the funnel gaining momentum until it drops into the hole (kind of like an object approaching an event horizon). My brother postulated that a person would not get spaghettified at the even horizon because we are too small of a mass. However, the Plumber Physicist Leonard Susskin said on the show that a person and space ship would be too small of a mass to ever quite reach the event horizon but they would eventually be spaghettified just the same. He uses and example of Alice as an astronaut in a space suit and Bob in the spacecraft. He famously got into a huge fight with Hawking and won. 

He's one of the fathers of string theory so possibly everything he says is bullshit. Go astrophysicists!

I thought we should launch some kind of space craft to launch things into a black hole and see what happened to them. My brother watched the Minotaur 1 launch and said it looked like "a shooting star but in reverse". I was emailing with him when the launch happened but wasn't there to drink beer and actually witness it.

Then I started thinking about how a black hole is either dormant (i.e. not sucking in everything around it) or omnivorous (eating the universe). I postulated that when the black hole is dormant it is passing material into the galaxy (could explain how certain elements showed up in the milky way that could not have resulted from the big bang) and that when it's consuming that's how we could do space travel via worm holes. 

My brother Bob, because he's a dick, was like "yeah, but the closest black hole is really far away".

If we are right...you read it here first...