More Stretching At Home

So, I don't stretch enough. I run a lot, but once someone told me, or maybe hinted that, you didn't necessarily have to stretch before or after you run and so I took that and deemed it the word of the Lord and just stopped stretching all together. I know it feels good, and stuff, but it takes up time I could be . . . I mean instead of stretching I get a lot of . . . something done.

I don't know why I stopped but I did. (Also, once someone (someone Korean) told me only a dead man signs his name in red and so now if I'm at the grocery store and I see the woman hands me a red pen, I try to cut her to the quick and dig in my purse for a non-life threatening blue pen. If I'm not fast enough though, I don't want to explain my delicate life/pen situation to her so I will take the pen and sign someone else's name on the line, but only someone who is already dead. Never once has a checker asked me why my signature looks so much like Abraham Lincoln - that's not very good security ladies.)

But it hasn't gone unnoticed to my body. Not stretching after running, combined with seventeen hours a day sitting in a chair makes me all creaky, and sore, and frozen in place, but I usually don't realize it until I stand up and realize I'm hunched over more than Quasimodo.

So, today I was in the bathroom and before I could sit down (but after I'd undone my pants and pulled them down most of the way) I realized my hips felt all out of whack and I needed to do a lunge sort of a thing, and a little stretch for my legs, so I lunge out, pants down, because I'm in the handicap stall and there's all kinds of room and it feels sooooo good, and I do that old-man sort of a groan and go, "Gahlah, my back.", and it feels so good that I decide to do the other side and just as I've maneuvered into position again (because for some reason I have not pulled my pants up for this, I'm just working around it, which is making things complicated, but not impossible), and I'm getting a good stretch in, another woman walks into the bathroom - which would be fine if our bathroom was built with some sort of code or privacy in mind, but in this bathroom the space between the stall doors is wide enough to pass a plate of food through, and the woman inadvertently sees me all stretched out, pants down, yawning my face off and I freeze and stare at her, and she freezes and stares at me, and then I have no idea what to do, so I blurt out, "Just stretching over here! I sit!" I sit? "I mean, all day." She doesn't say anything so I sort of smile, and slowly (as if maybe if I move slow enough she won't see what I'm doing) I pull my legs together, until I'm sort of standing, but still totally crouching over because I'm so tall she would be able to see my head over the stall door, and then I tip toe over to the toilet and sit there until I'm 100% sure she's been gone for fifteen minutes so there's absolutely no way I will run into her in the hallway where I'll have to pretend to have a good laugh about telling her I sit, and doing a whore's version of yoga in a public restroom.

Needless to say, I'm going to start stretching more at home. Apparently it's not only good for you, it's also good for the health of the general public as well.