no good deed goes unpunished

Yesterday I helped out at the local high school, painting walls a rather garish shade of plum. There was also gardening on offer, but I find that particularly hard on my lower back, so I chose the painting, thinking I was doing myself a favour. Hmmm.

I was climbing up to line a cornice with masking tape when I felt an odd wrenching feeling in whatever joint it is that joins the top of your left leg to your pelvis. It felt weird all day, like when your back is a bit out, but there was little pain. Not so this morning. Today that joint feels stiff and the muscles (tendons maybe?) are sore. Getting up from a sitting position is painful, but most of the time it just feels achey.

Maybe I'm just getting old. :)

On a brighter note, last night I saw the movie Death Race. So much fun. It's one of those movies that is really pretty pointless (unless you are the company who will make a squillion dollars from the video game) but you can't help but enjoy the adrenaline rush. Like many movies in this genre it has an appalling (and not very original) basic premise ~ in this case the 'futuristic society uses prisoners for colosseum-type blood sports' setting. Don't you just love how the future of society is always depicted as either Utopian or completely depraved? We love us our extremes, don't we? Kudos to whoever cast Joan Allen as the nasty chief warden ~ anyone who saw her in the Bourne movies just knew she was destined to portray a calm-faced villain at some point.

Anyway, watching the mice try to defeat some nasty maze-keepers was just the mindless activity I needed to shake off my low mood over the Proposition 8 decision. Feeling down is exhausting and counter-productive. Reality does sometimes bite, but its teeth don't seem as sharp when I face it and move on. So be it.