Saga continues…

Just when I become hopeful, this injury bitch slaps me back to reality. Oi vey! Things were feeling great and on Saturday I did my “leg” workout including some heavy calf raises. In hindsight that was a bad idea. I woke up Sunday morning with a lot of pain in the knee…similar to the knee pain I’ve had running. Went to visit Dr. Hagy today (it was just a coincidence that I had a follow up appointment. He thinks it’s possible the cyst is back. Great. 

Tonight in desperation, I bought some KT tape and I’ve taped my leg. I might also buy a strap, though my PT advises against them. He says it allows one to ignore the underlying problem. Probably true but not comforting when you just want to resume activity. 

In other news, I’m lonely. March is the worst month for me. It can’t be good when the Ides of March, my birthday (getting older), and the anniversary of my mother’s death are all in the same week. The whole month leaves me depressed. The weather doesn’t help. In like a lion, out like a lamb? I somehow seem to miss the lamb part. March always feels like “in like a lion, out like a pack of hungry hyaenas”. It does, however, make me want to fly a kite. One of my best memories as a child was flying kites in March with my dad.Maybe it only happened a time or two but it’s forever embedded in my memory. Maybe I need a kite! Back to the lonely part. Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s the month, I dunno…but I feel distant from so many of my friends, even my closest ones. I feel like the age of Facebook has made the whole word ego centric and no one is interested in actually being a friend when the chips are down. Everyone just seems to be a on a surface level with one another and show off their photos of their happy life. God forbid you actually need someone with whom you can talk about life problems. It’s become a world where one is expected to produce a vaseline smile, even when you’re hurting because it would be bad form to feel downhearted when others are having a great time. Just push the “like” button, darn it! This has NOTHING to do with Kilimanjaro other than a stupid analogy between friendships and the snows on Kili that came to mind. Just now I realized that even old friendships, just like ancient glaciers, eventually melt away. Heartbreaking but a natural process, I suppose. Without glaciers, you can’t have lush valleys. How big of a moraine will it leave though? 

I want to end this post on a brighter note than injuries and broken friendships. Lemme think, lemme think. Oh I know! I’ve been teaching myself Kiswahili. Did you know that the people are Swahili and the language is Kiswahili? I didn’t until I started studying it. “ki” means “the language of” so it goes in front of all the other language names. So Kiswahili means the language of the Swahili. Kiingereza means “language of the English, etc. I really like it so far. It’s such a sing songy, rhyming language and it makes a lot of sense in my head so far. I downloaded the first lesson from Pimsleur and it’s going really well. I know a lot of people like Rosetta Stone but personally, I prefer Pimsleur. It’s what I used to learn Albanian. Rosetta Stone (I used it for French) seems to teach a lot of vocabulary and that’s great but Pimsleur has you speaking and understanding conversations within 30 minutes. Right now I can greet people and ask how they are (Jambo! Habari gani?), I can say I  understand English (Ni nafahamu kiingereza), I don’t understand kiswahili (sifahamu kiswahili), Do you understand English? (U nafahamu kiingereza?), yes and no, thank you, please, excuse me, etc. etc. I’m pretty excited about all of this since most of the porters don’t speak English. I think when one travels to another country, it’s polite to attempt to speak the native language. It’s a sign of respect. Granted, it won’t get your far in France (My friend Michelle can attest to that) but it seems to work everywhere else. With regards to the porters and guides, I will rely on them on the mountain so it’s important that I can express gratitude and respect to them. 

Habari za usiku!