I tripped (over nothing that I could afterward perceive) on Friday, just walking with Crystal and Susan (Susan being a companion of the border collie variety), and took a rather violent flight directly into the sidewalk. My knee hit the cement first, followed fairly quickly by my hands. My head missed a decorative brick lining a little flower bed by maybe an inch. (It was pretty distressing, watching that scalloped brick flying so rapidly toward my face!) After picking myself up off the ground and dusting off my hands and clothing, I found that I was so disoriented and shocky that I didn't want to continue walking home. A nice man who lives in the house there (no doubt it was his decorative brick I menaced so ineffectively with my face) let me sit on his steps, kept solicitously offering me glasses of water, asking if I was okay, etc. Crystal went to get her car (about a mile away at her house, since she had been on foot that whole day) and came back to pick me up. When I got up to walk, I realized that my knee was hurting quite a lot. Drat.

So I came home, embarrassed at my clumsiness, limping on a severely bruised knee, and proceeded to spend the next 2 1/2 days mostly sitting on the couch with my right leg elevated, watching tv, playing games on the iPod Touch, and regularly putting ice packs on my knee. The weekend of injury-mandated laziness seems to have worked, and my knee feels mostly fine today. Not entirely fine, but well enough to do about 4 miles of walking (in 1-mile increments) today and almost 2 miles of biking, with only a minor amount of pain.

Happily enough, the weekend of quiescence seems to have drastically reduced my state of emotional anxiety and stress, as well, so I'm feeling like myself again, which is a relief.

In other news, I've been listening to this terrible terrible terrible book on audio. It's called The Five People You Meet in Heaven, and I don't know what possessed me to check it out from the library. I was looking for something sort of inspirational, something in which people find a way to see the world in a more positive light, and, well, I did get that, but I got it in the form of an extremely long Hallmark card. This book is seriously going to make me throw up in my mouth. Every single sentence, every single word, every single syllable is utterly trite, cliché, banal, and I really should consult the thesaurus for more words to describe this literary travesty. The book it most reminds me of -- and I'm ashamed to admit I even read it -- is The Bridges of Madison County. The plots are completely different, but the skin-crawly feeling they give me is much the same.

There are excellent books that make you feel good about the world and about the sometimes unexpected possibilities that lie within us all. I know there are. They don't all come utterly buried in syrup and little candy hearts and FTD slogans. They aren't all unsurprising and intellectually lazy and ironically depressing. I need to find some of those books. The good ones. Lately, the only ones like that I've found have been in the Young Adult section, which I find kinda cool (Kids are reading cool stuff, and not just "Twilight"!), but also kinda sad (Apparently, the grown-ups don't want to challenge their brains.).

So if you have any book recommendations -- stuff that's uplifting without making me want to scratch my eyes out -- let me know.