cramps

A couple of days ago Melissa woke me up tossing and turning and screaming about ‘not wanting to go in there.’ I could only imagine that it had something to do with Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. I wouldn’t want to go in there either. That’s probably the scariest place ever.

But that doesn’t really have anything at all to do with what I was going to write about except that Melissa was sleeping. Twice in the last month I have been very rudely awakened by an excruciating throbbing in my lower right leg as every muscle in my calf suddenly decides it wants to tighten into a teeny little ball of granite. After I get past the “my appendage feels like a shot-put landed on it after being hit by a car”* it’s really quite nice.

For one thing, at that exact instance of occurrence I am completely awake with no desire whatsoever to go back to sleep. If I could plan these torturous spasms to happen at the exact moment my alarm went off instead of 01:42, it would be perfect. Or I could start waking up at 01:42. I’m still working that out.

These paroxysms of agonizing pain (really a minor inconvenience, as it were) also give me the very rare opportunity to do a speed sit-up. In fact, I believe you would be hard pressed to find anyone that could do an unexpected sit-up from a completely prone position and without anyone holding their legs faster than I can. And it would be nigh impossible to find someone with my fantastic physic who possesses such talent. This is a great skill that I can only imagine will become very useful later in life.

Finally, I highly doubt that there exists anyone who is as adept as I am at letting out blood-curdling screams completely under their breath. This is also a skill that I believe will be very useful in life. For example, imagine you are walking down a dark trail in the middle of the woods and didn’t have a “freaking 12-gauge”** with you. Now imagine you happen to step on a sleeping wolverine that immediately starts to viciously tear apart your leg and then imagine you look around and see that there is a sleeping Tyrannosaurus Rex lying right next to the wolverine. At this point you would want to let out a blood-curdling scream completely under your breath so as to not wake the T-Rex; if the T-Rex were to awaken, you would end up like the goat in Jurassic Park.

This situation is more easily imagined if you have ever had one of these leg cramps and been camping recently with Melissa.

*ode to Charity
**ode to Napoleon Dynamite