In this day and age, it is all too easy to send a seemingly harmless email to the wrong person.  I read about it all the time in the embarrassing stories section of magazines.  A treacherous co-worker burn, a gossipy girl email, it’s basically unavoidable these days with so much mobile, digital traffic flying around.

I am not an innocent bystander in all of this, quite the contrary.  With my inability to hold back quick quips in binary form, I often mail things I regret.  Lately I have come to enjoy it a little too much though.  First the stories (that are decent enough for my blog)…

My roomate and I were searching for a home, and naturally, we let them come to us.  Numerous people from craigslist wrote to us about the housing they had available.  One woman offered us a particularly expensive and inopportunely located heckhole, and I promptly responded to my roommate, or so I thought, that I was certainly not going to pay that much for something “so far in the boonies”.   She wrote back and was actually quite kind, and I think maybe found my honesty amusing.

Then, this Sunday night, I received an email from a fellow Kristen French in the world.  She had found my blog while googling herself, and informed me that there were approximately 87 Kristen French’s in the US.  I wrote back to tell her the tale of my own Kristen French nemesis, the one who has my email address at university who hasn’t forwarded on emails for five years.  Who doesn’t catch on by then?! Suffice it to say that I later realized by the aid of facebook and her middle name, that she is in fact, the email culprit.  Am I adding fuel to the fire right now? We shall see. I haven’t received a response or any of the past 700 billion emails intended for my purposes.

But here is my point.  It is easy for messages to get mixed in the blackberry sidekick haze of our digital life, but maybe unintentional emails that tell the truth are truly effective.  They convey the message without sly wording or emoticons,  in ways uncommon in our society anymore, while eliminating the awkward obligatory response of a face to face human.  I feel like a dementor saying all of this, but I love it when the truth finds new ways to break free! hahahahhaaaaaaaaa lol xoxo poop

The Case: Kristen, running for a frisbee, jumping into the air to stop said frisbee from entering the eager hands of an offender, Kristen on the ground, running around, unable to breathe.

I got the wind knocked out of me really hard today, and my medical mind started wondering what was going on.

The Diagnosis:

Getting the wind knocked out of you is a phrase that mainly refers to a kind of diaphragm spasm that occurs when sudden force is applied to the abdomen which puts pressure on the solar plexus. It results in a temporary paralysis of the diaphragm that makes it difficult to breathe for a short period of time.^[1][2] It can also occur from a strong blow to the back.

When the abdomen is struck, a large difference in pressure occurs across the diaphragm. The diaphragm then stretches, which also stretches the diaphragm’s nerves. The resulting mechanical force puts the diaphragm into a muscle spasm, comparable to having a charley horse in the leg. It takes a few seconds for the diaphragm to relax again before breathing can resume normally. Martial artists are often taught to breathe out heavily when struck in the stomach, to minimize this effect.

Thank you wikipedia.  You learn something new every day!

Everything I love in my apartment…

That was my roommate’s response to my suggestion that we do an abs battle to the death. I don’t know what happened, but I entered a parallel universe filled with gloom and doom last week that was quite unpleasant, but I have remembered the glory of life. As usual, the writing hiatus is due to midterms, which, let’s face it, contributed to the gloom and the doom.

Fortunately, inner peace has returned, and I have been questing like a knight in mideval times, creating victories for Ron Paul, vanquishing foes and dragons, playing intramural frisbee like an uncoordinated unicorn, and making sketchyhitos (one part rum, one part lemon, brown sugar, 7 up) like a mighty alchemist.  Life is good.