Somehow I managed to bruise the ball of my left foot. I might have done it carrying Jackson down the ladder from his bed. He has this big wooden bunk bed with shelves and storage and a desk underneath, but the rungs of the bed ladder are meant for wee elfin feet, not my big gorilla flaps, and so I think one morning I was carrying Jackson down out of bed like a dauphin whose alabaster appendages must never grace the ground -- actually, it's just because I'm a sucker and like his muggy smell in the morning so I always wrap him up and carry him to the living room while I gnaw on his neck, and then I unceremoniously dump him on the couch. But to get him down from his bed I end up balancing with his and my combined weight on a bunk bed ladder rung the width of Scotch tape.

So, if I weigh approximately 150 pounds and Jackson's another approximate 50, and I am traveling backward at a rate of one mpm (meter per minute) balancing 200 pounds on one square inch of nerve-dense footal tissue centered mysteriously behind the fourth toe of my left foot, how long before my nerves are damaged to the point where my gait resembles that of an elderly orangutan with an ill-fitting (rubber) prosethesis?

Thank Feodor Dostoyevsky for Earth Shoes. All that negative heel propaganda is finally paying off, they're the only shoes that I can wear right now that allow me to shift enough my weight to my heel that I don't look quite so much like I'm nurturing a foot vagina.

Unfortunately for my inner thirteen-year-old girl, whom I had recently appeased by impulsively rescuing these scrappy gems from Nordstrom Rack:

If only I could wear them without crying out in pain.

Finally, here's a Byrneunit-required list of films number 27 through 32 on my Netflix queue:

27. Broadcast News
Such a crush on William Hurt after this (one point on which I am uncharacteristically consistent, as some will recall: I always like the dumb guy).

28. Me and You and Everyone We Know
This keeps getting bumped down the queue to the point where I don't even know what it is anymore.

29. The Anniversary Party
I keep seeing little bits of this on IFC, and was intrigued enough to put it on the queue but not with a top-ten commitment.

30. Beauty and the Beast
This is really for Jackson, but it's the Cocteau version, with the human arms coming out of the walls holding candles, and the creepy way Beauty floats around without moving her legs? So this will probably stay mid-queue for another ten or fifteen years.

31. Knowing Me Knowing You: The Complete Series
Is this some British TV series that's supposed to be good? It's been on the queue for so long I've forgotten.

32. Bottle Rocket
Jack barely tolerates the Wes Anderson/Owen Wilson combo (notwithstanding The Life Aquatic, believe it or not), so this one won't make it into our mailbox for awhile. Bonus trivia: when we lived in L.A. I worked in the editing house that made the trailer for this! So I've already seen it twenty times.