Monthly Archives: April 2018

I love going to decade specific nights at the Bell House.  It has a huge dance space in the concert/event “big room”, and at least one Saturday a month they through a decade specific dance party.  Usually this takes the form of Party Like It’s 1999, the 90s dance party, at which I can relive all the greatest dance hits that I didn’t like the first time they were popular, but at least now are laced with nostalgia!  (The DJ once played almost all of “Out of Time” one time in the first hour before the club filled up though so I can forgive him constantly trotting out “The Boy Is Mine”)

More recently, the Bell House has seen a rise in popularity for DJ Jane Elizabeth’s “Tainted Love” nights.  These are described as “building on a solid foundation of New Wave” but in reality, have turned out to be far more esoteric.  Here’s the playlist for the 4/21 edition that Paul and I went to:

When we walked in, my first reaction was that, unlike the 90s nights, I was on the younger side of the Tainted Love crowd.  At 90s nights, even though I graduated high school in the middle of the decade, the Millennial “baby boom” that started in 1983 outnumber those of us born earlier.  Therefore, the DJ plays more late 90s songs to appeal to the millennials nostalgia, instead of sticking to the good half of the decade.  We all know that the back half of the 90s sucked for music because it was all downhill after Kurt died.  (see also: shitty pop punk, rap-rock, overproduced R&B, boy bands, girl bands, etc).  This means that by 1am, I’m totally over the music that appeals to people who are only a couple years younger than I am and feel like yelling at them all to get off my lawn because they are kids with no taste in music, as if there’s a real generational divide there

JUST PLAY VS AND CALL  IT A DAY

My second reaction was that this was an audience looking for older mainstream 80s music.  I am nostalgic about the late 80s from having been a child, and nostalgic about dark 80s from being a goth.  But I am too young to have seen John Hughes movies the first time they came out.  Paul isn’t even old enough for that kind of nostalgia (1975), and neither of us have any nostalgia for Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” outside of Bootie.  The crowd around us was gleefully screaming along “JUST A SMALL TOWN GIRL, LIVIN’ IN A LONELY WORRRRRLD”, so at that moment we felt like we’d fallen into the wrong soundtrack.

Then DJ Jane Elizabeth put on “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” and i was placated.  First of all, see above on Early 90s nostalgia from childhood.  Second, BLACK MIRROR!  That’s literally the soundtrack to the only happy ending episode, which is about finding your True Love (SPOILER IN VIDEO)

I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING

The irony goes layers deep here, people: “Heaven Is A Place on Earth” is now a song associated with a show that correctly identified our culture’s desire to spend eternity in an artificially created nostalgic environment, and it was being played in an artificially created nostalgia environment that I just didn’t have to upload my brain into in order to access.  Also, I would like to spend eternity dancing my MY true love as well, but Paul and I both agree we would have to go to the evil club in town, which was playing Paul’s favorite band (the Pixies) and honestly, just looked like Bar Sinister (Why does the evil club always just look like Bar Sinister?  Honestly, most goths are HARMLESS)

Still, I’d kind of like a club night that skews to my age group.  Not those Nickelodeon watching kids that came after me, not the mainstream-80s nostalgia, but someplace that would hit people in the Xennial band.  It would run from the late 80s through the Britpop craze, and cut out the worst parts of the late 90s.  But because I fall in the 1977-1983 gap between the Xers and the Millenials, I don’t think my subset of people have the numbers to make it happen yet.  In the meantime, I’ll just have to lean on GenX nostalgia to placate me until I can either upload my brain into a 1996 environment for nostalgia therapy…or these millennials take their stupid Third Eye Blind and their stupider Blink 182 and all the other awful bands with numbers from the 90s and get off my lawn.

I sprained my ankle on Monday night:

I bounced off the curb outside my house, landed wrong, and immediately went down on the pavement.  You can see the scrape on the side of my foot where my rolling foot hit the rough gravel of the street fill material, directly above my ballooning ankle itself.

Obviously, I was on auto-pilot, focusing on getting to the car to help Paul unload groceries, while talking to my mother on my Bluetooth headphones.  So I suppose the lesson I’ve learned here is BE MINDFUL OF THE STUPID 3″ CURB.

After going down, landing on my side, and being grateful I didn’t roll into an oncoming car in the process, I just started yelling ANKLE ANKLE ANKLE while gasping for breath from the pain.  Paul helped me up, and then I hobbled, slowly, up the 16 stairs to my apartment.  I still had the presence of mind to grab a bag of frozen vegetables before  collapsing on the couch:

When Paul came back in, he brought me extra pillows and a bucket.  Why a bucket?  BECAUSE THE PAIN WAS SO BAD I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO THROW UP.  Thankfully, after elevating and icing the injury – and four Advil – it subsided a bit.

I then proceeded to throw any work I had planned to do out the metaphorical window and watched Netflix for two hours.  The Toys that Made Us was surprisingly distracting from the pain!

It was especially enjoyable because the women of Mattel were badass.  Recommend for anyone who has Netflix and was born in the 70s.  Certainly better researched than the Robot Chicken equivalent.

I woke up Tuesday to slightly less pain and the ability to hobble.  After posts from nurse friends on Facebook convinced me to get my ankle checked just in case, I managed to hobble down the stairs, outside to a car, and into my local doctor clinic.  The swelling was slightly better by then:

I had hoped that my local clinic doctor would look at my ankle, declare it a normal sprain, and send me on my way home again.  Instead, he agreed with my nurse friends that it could be a fracture or tear, and suggested I go for X-rays and a specialist diagnosis.  He then proceeded to kindly call four podiatrists before finding only one that had both imaging equipment on site and walk-in availability: a doctor at Weill Cornell on the Upper East Side.

From Fort Greene to the UES is a long way, but I managed it.  I hobbled down the subway stairs, clinging to the railing and side stepping one step at a time.  I took my two trains, taking full advantage of the mid-day space to sit down.  I took the elevator to street level at 63rd and Lex, and then flagged a taxi to get me to the medical facility.  That was where I realized, this wasn’t a clinic, it was New York Presbyterian, a HUGE facility I would have to hobble around for the next few hours.

It turned out to all be OK though.  My main fear wasn’t the pain itself, but rather, any damage I might be doing by hobbling around.  Pain I can handle, anxiety, I cannot.  I got my X-rays, saw the specialist, and got a great look inside my ankle on the ultrasound machine:

(Image courtesy of Anatomy Physiotherapy, this is not my actual ankle)

The doctor kindly explained what we were seeing: the bones, the ligaments, the tendons.  Ultimately, he found a small tear and told me that it was between a 1 and a 2 on a scale of 3 in ankle sprains.  No fractures, no tendon separating or anything weird, just a plain old sprain.  He prescribed me an anti-inflammatory and an AirCast:

And  now I’m thankful to have the opportunity to WFH for the rest of the week until I travel to Toronto on Friday.  I can walk a little better today than yesterday: I can put more weight on my right leg, and I can walk with my foot forward.  Yesterday, I walked with my foot to the side, dragging my right leg and keeping it straight in a way that allowed me to hobble through the streets of New York City without turning my ankle at all.  Today is much better already – even if it is still hard getting up, and I wish I had done more pistol squats before this happened

Had I done more of these, getting up off the couch would be a breeze!

Obviously, many lessons have been learned here, not the least of which is to be grateful that this should be healed within 1 – 2 weeks.  The doctor suggested doing single-leg stands starting next Tuesday the 1st, as well as some simple physical therapy exercises I can do at home to get mobility back in the ankle once it’s released from it’s Aircast prison.

This has also reminded me to be grateful every day that I have a completely healthy and working body and to take advantage of it by going for a walk.  Being unable to freely walk around makes me regret all the times I didn’t take a break to go outside.  Go outside, people!  It’s spring!  Your ankles work!