Ironically, on the day my essay about playing tennis in MORE arrived, I got out of bed feeling as if someone had been nailing horseshoes to the soles of my feet overnight. Agony. I could barely hobble to the bathroom. Gerry and I had a rousing game yesterday--we picked up two women of a certain age down at the public courts by Lake Merritt--or maybe they picked us up as we sat on the bench waiting for them to finish and we had a rousing game of doubles.

I was leaping and flying and skipping and hopping all over the court, trash-talking the entire time and high-fiving my partner, and I'm paying for it today. Plantar fasciaitis. At the time I wrote the MORE essay, in 2008, I could boast about being relatively injury-free for my age. But all the tennis and the self-defense classes are taking their toll, and it's time for this old girl to get orthotics. (Stil, I'll be damned if I hobble down the aisle at my wedding in orthopedic shoes. I have to draw the line somewhere; high heels for that forty-five minutes, or bust. Ouch!)

Websudoku has been off my computer for a few days now, thanks to the perseverance of our computer guru, who has had to take more steps to get rid of it than he initially imagined. "It would be much easier if you were addicted to porn," he joked with me. There's tons of porn-blocking software out there. Unfortunately, Sudoku is considered a positive thing, a brain game. My M.D. even recommended it to me! So blocking it, customizing the parental controls--has been hard. Maybe when I've got more healing and more perspective under my belt, I'll write an essay about it that will influence software companies and internet providers like AOL to customize their parental controls more. A lot of people probably want to do that to their computers.

I do feel clearer--the part of my brain that could escape into the number combinations is quieter. I read in MORE that music stimulates dopamine production. Although I love music, and I'm marrying a musician and composer, I often work and live in silence with just thoughts and words buzzing in my head. It's as if it were too rich for my blood sometimes.

Right after I separated from my first husband music would make me cry. I had to be selective about playing it--was I in the mood for a sob-fest, or did I want to stay away from those emotions? over the years I've just gotten into the habit of not playing it. Of course I listen to music in the car while I'm driving, and C and I do sometimes at home--and I love the sounds of him practicing. But I don't take initiative to play my own CD's--it's as if I've ceded the musical part of our lives to him. And I don't, say, play Mozart--or anything--in the background while I'm writing. I wonder if I was vulnerable to the Sudoku addiction because I had shut off from that whole part of myself?