Pinky Therapy

So, it turns out my colleagues were not that far off the mark. One of the things I have to do for therapy is put my hand in a sinkful of hot water twice a day and try to flex the injured finger. I also have to wrap my finger in a length of elastic bandage twice a day to bring the swelling down. At the physical therapy office, they had this wonderful machine, which I wish I had at home. You put your hand into what feels like warm sand (actually it's ground-up cornhusks), the therapist flicks a switch, and the sand starts churning around while you do opening-and-closing-your-hand exercises. It was utterly soothing.

The whole experience was kind of fun--a roomful of adults of various ethnicities and walks of life siting around doing exercises with brightly colored toys and rubberbands, kind of like kindergarten. Most of the people there knew each other and were chatting away. The therapist was brisk and kind.

Physical therapy was pretty much the highlight of an uneventful and rainy weekend spent grading papers. I did make it to the gym once, did laundry, bought groceries, walked to the park where a few of my noninjured friends were playing volleyball in the dreamy grayness. I also went to the movies today and saw The Squid and the Whale, a film about the effects of divorce on a Park Slope (Brooklyn) family circa 1986, told mostly from the perspective of the two adolescent sons. It was painful at moments but also very funny and somehow, as the reviews said, forgiving. Oddly, I had just read pretty much in one sitting the new Nick Hornsby novel, How to Be Good, also about divorce. The couple in the novel live in a North London "postal code" whose inhabitants' intellectual and political leanings (pretensions?) seem to correspond roughly with those of the Park Slope population pictured in the movie. In the Hornsby novel, the couple are on the brink of divorce but don't do it. Their marriage, troubled to begin with, becomes even more complicated when the husband undergoes a conversion from angry, sarcastic bastard to an almost oppressively forgiving and saintly character. His behavior, in addition to infuriating his wife (from whose first-person perspective the story is told), makes her (and us) think about what lies behind liberal sentiments about helping others. Very funny and unsettling, even to the very end. And I found convincing the author's assumption of the narrative voice of a thoughtful woman trying to understand whether she should stay in her marriage and whether she is a "good" person and why she is so unhappy. I had a little trouble with the husband, whose conversion seemed too extreme and who ended up seeing like a caricature.

Back to grading papers. Or perhaps I will allow myself to watch the last 45 minutes of Medium, one of my guilty pleasures.