Gosh, so much has happened since my last post! If you remember, last Saturday I threw my back out. Well, since then I have laid on my back, wincing with pain every time I moved. END OF UPDATE.

Yeah, this particular back injury is one tenacious motherfucker. When this has happened before, it has usually started to ease up after about four days. This one has no intention of leaving. I missed an entire week of work; I had a couple of physical therapy appointments and then an MRI on Thursday, which revealed a “prominent disc bulge.” Funny how “prominent” and “bulge” are usually so alluring together, and yet you toss “disc” in the middle and it loses all of its sexiness. It’s like putting the word “training” between “hot” and “pants.”

I’m seeing an orthopedist on Monday. My back has been feeling a little. better, by which I mean it’s now only a five-point procedure in hauling myself out of bed, rather than the old 12-point plan. But perhaps that’s the Percocet (which I just got two days ago) talking. Look at me, I’m Paula Abdul! I’ve had vicodin occasionally, and I never saw what the fuss was about. And I tried one Percocet and again, found it underwhelming. But then I tried TWO Percocet. Hello, best friend!

Anyway, hopefully after some more physical therapy and time, this will go away. I swear daily that when this is all healed, I am finally going to either do yoga or at least regularly do back exercises to make sure this never happens again. This of course is the same oath I make every time I throw my back out. And then it heals, and I promptly forget said oath. It’s much like a teenager praying for a negative on a pregnancy test. But this time I mean it, dammit. Who knows, maybe this will all lead to a program of stretching that will, for the first time in my life, allow me to touch my toes. I am the least flexible person in the world. Even as a kid, I dreaded story time on the mat, because it would mean me struggling for a half hour to maintain the cross-legged sit. (Or, as we so insensitively called it in those days, “Indian style.” Or was it the “Mexican squat”? I always get the un-PC comments of the days of yore mixed up.) I would usually last about ten minutes before my limbs would snap back to their usual straight position and I would topple back to the mat, arms akimbo. And that’s why the ladies loved me.

I’ve also learned the dangers of flailing around the web for suggestions for a cure for back pain. If you tally up all the random posts on the Internet answering the question, “What do you do for back pain?”, it would be a perfect four way tie between “heat on the first day, then ice,” “only ice,” “only wet heat” and “alternate heat and cold.” And as positive a person is that theirs is the only way to go, the next person is just as positive that the previous poster is a fucking idiot who is a danger to himself and others. Can I get a goddamn consensus here? It makes me long for the pre-Internet days, when everyone had to keep their utter surety to themselves. One doctor, one directive.

So how did I keep myself busy during my prone days? Watching I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! I can’t resist this awful show. The cast is not only unapologetically D-list, but they’ve also all let themselves go. One doughy ex-NBA star, two doughy Baldwins, and Lou Diamond Phillips, who looks like he’s constantly sucking in his gut. And when he lets that thing go, it will knock everyone down in his path. I feel like the stringent game-show laws about truthfulness that came about after the Twenty-One scandal in the 50s should be applied here: legally, when the hosts refer to the players as celebrities, they should be forced to use air quotes. Otherwise, it’s just a bald-faced lie. Seriously, Frangela? What the fuck is a Frangela?

And Patti Blogojevich! There was a ridiculous moment in which she told a bunch of castmates how the evil forces that were railroading her husband, Rod (the same husband—and same wife, come to think of it—who was caught on tape licking their lips over the bribes they were demanding). And all the other “celebrities” began tut-tutting about how unfair it all was, and boy, was he a good man who would ultimately triumph. How reassuring it must be to be surrounded by people who have never read a newspaper in their lives. They say that many celebrities are unfairly let out of jury duty: after watching this scene, I am all for it.

So that’s the exciting part of my days: Waiting for this show to come on. Well, that and trying to time all trips to the bathroom to the crest of the Percocet wave. Oh, and staring at a heating blanket and an ice pack, trying desperately not to make the wrong decision. (Incidentally, my physical therapist votes for ice, and I’m sticking with that, thank you very much.)

First things first: is anyone watching Breaking Bad? Goddamn, that’s a great show, but unrelentingly dark and tense. My stomach hurts and the end of every episode, but in a good way. You know, like I’ve just eaten a really entertaining but enormous burrito. Last week’s episode was particularly intense, as the young dealer, Jessie—on orders from meth-cooker Walt to get his ripped-off money back from a couple of tweakers—went to their house only to find their little neglected kid wandering around hungry in his underpants. Just a crushing scene, especially when the dirtbag parents came back. These characters were pretty damn skeevy for TV drug addicts. Usually drug addicts on TV are just hot actresses with dirt rubbed on their faces who have been told to scratch their arms a lot. But this was the whole deal: filth, boils on their faces, etc. Check it out. It sure ain’t feel-good TV, but then again, I never walk away from American Idol feeling particularly good, either.

Anyway, on to an un-TV-related point: My friend—we’ll call her Betty, even though she knows damn well who she is—enjoys sharing stories with me every day about some alibi or another that she’s concocted to get out of something with a friend. It usually involves telling someone that they never got their invitation: either the voicemail never came through, or randomly only came through five hours later, or the email got dumped into her spam folder. And we laugh and laugh together aobut her chicanery. Ha, ha, chicanery! And yet I now realize that any time I invite her to get our families together and she says Wow, she really wants to, but they can’t make it for X reason…X reason is probably horseshit. She swears that no, she would never pull that crap with me, but who are we kidding? And I recently recalled phoning her a couple of years ago to see if she and her husband and daughter wanted to join us at a museum. I didn’t hear back until the end of the day, when she said, with a sense of dramatic shock, “That is so weird, I only just got your voicemail right now!” An excuse that is still in her top 5 of bullshittery. I call retroactive bullshit!

But how can I get angry when I use those fake alibis myself? Well, not that one exactly, but when I’m really late to respond to an email, I have been known to eventually write back with, “Wow, I just found this in my Spam folder! Sorry I didn’t respond earlier, but I’m just seeing it now!” I think that Spam was originally invented to give people an excuse not to respond to friends for weeks: the ability to blanket people with penis-enlargement supplements was just a happy byproduct.

But when someone says, “Wow, that’s weird, I never got your voicemail,” or uses the spam excuse, and you know deep down that they’re lying, you’ve got a problem. You can’t call them on it, no matter how sure you are, because the surer you are only implicates you more as someone who does that him or herself. Imagine you accuse them of lying. Then they say, “What are you talking about? My voicemail is screwy!” Then you’re left to hammer them over and over, until you bring out the most definitive proof you have: “I known you're lying because I say that tons of time, and my voicemail has never once dropped a call, or postponed it five hours!” You have then given them the freedom to keep denying it, while calling you paranoid and a bad friend to others. It only exposes you. It’d be like if you noticed someone had red-stained hands, and you knew firsthand that the only way to get those particular stains is if you spend your weekends strangling hobos. How can you make that point without revealing that you have a bloody bindle collection in your own basement?

Has anybody ever really been late returning a call because a voicemail delayed the message by hours? Is that even something voicemail does? And I’d be curious to hear how often people blame spam folders for tardy email replies: Sure, sometimes important emails do get sent to spam, but what’s the ratio of spam-to-lie? I'm guessing it's about 1:5. And, most importantly, are my friend and I the only ones using these excuses, and this entire post has—ironically—done nothing but expose me as a filthy liar and a bad person? That brings to mind a joke I told during my incredibly brief post-college standup comedy career (like, two months). I said how the danger of attempting Seinfeldian observational comedy is that you may publicly discover that what you thought was universal behavior turned out to just be your own freakishness. i.e. “You remember when you used to go to carnivals when you were a kid? And remember those merry-go-rounds? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. Remember how every time, before you’d get on one of those horses, you always had to lick the seat? Uh…hello?”

Incidentally, thanks to everyone for their feedback on my recent conundrum about whether or not to make a stink. The consensus seems to be "Be a dick, but a rational dick." Or, rather, firm yet fairly dickish. I will attempt this.

I started my Amazing Race TV Watch over on EW.com today, if you're keeping score. And if you're not a fan of the show, or dropped it after last season's week entry, I advise you to check the show out. (I am not a paid shill for CBS.) The first episode had people nearly fracturing their coccyxs trying to lug giant wheels of cheese in Switzerland. You normally have to pay 10 bucks to see that kind of high-stakes action in a movie theater: but here? Free!