I had my second-to-last appointment for my ¾ sleeve last night. I’d take a photo, but the bulk of what was done is on my shoulder, and it’s that dragging, wide needle grouping stuff that hurts like a bad sunburn, which means I’m less inclined to twist around to get an iPhone photo of it in the bathroom mirror. The below was nabbed from my artist’s Instagram, by which I mean I screengrabbed it and then e-mailed it to myself and cropped out the third panel, which was some woman in a Kermit Snuggie because…I mean, why the fuck not.

Despite the way it feels, I’m still planning to run today. The Zombie 5K is happening a lot sooner than I’d planned, mostly because I’m lazy and haven’t been training as hard as I originally intended. Currently, I can comfortably run a 12-minute mile, and by “comfortably” I mean “without feeling like I’m going to throw up.” Which sometimes happens when I work out. It’s not terribly attractive or dignified, but I don’t have a choice.

I’ve been this way since high school. Every year after soccer tryouts, I’d get home and spend about five minutes in the bathroom, heaving until my throat stopped twitching. As far as I can tell, it’s not a big problem or indicative of something wrong, it’s just how my body reacts to being overworked. It happened years ago during a session with a personal trainer, too, and I politely excused myself after stepping off the elliptical machine to go barf in the bathroom. A few quick schloops and I was done. When I bought a bike a few years ago and rode it back to my apartment in the middle of summer, I got almost all the way home before having to stop and lean against a tree to dry heave. This was much less private than previous bathroom venues, mostly because it was directly across the street from two cop cars performing a search and seizure on someone’s vehicle. If anything, at least the suspects handcuffed and sitting on the curb could later tell their friends that some purple-faced white girl on a bike got hideously sick in front of them while the cops searched their car.

The most recent episode also involved my bike. Graham and I went for a ride, and it only vaguely occurred to me that he’d been riding as a commuter for the past year, and that my bike was much heavier than his, and also it turned out that I didn’t even like riding a bike that much. Anyway, we were about six miles into the ride when we came upon this steep-but-not-extremely-high hill feature, and because the thought of struggling up something in slow motion makes me want to murder myself, I did what I always do when confronted with a challenge: I put my head down and my elbows out and powered through it and decided to deal with the physical discomfort later. “Later” turned out to be only about five minutes, when I asked Graham to pull over for a second so I could stumble to a patch of trees and vomit by the side of the road. A very busy road, by the way, during rush hour, so I guess not just in-the-process-of-being-arrested people in the ghetto have had the pleasure of seeing me exhaust-puke all over the place in public.

But like I said, I can do a 12-miute mile without puking. I realize that this is nothing to actual runners, that a 12-minute mile on a treadmill is not the same as a 12-minute mile outdoors, and that I am still going to be acutely miserable during the Zombie 5K. Possibly I will vomit. If so, I will call it my strategy to avoid “infection” and hopefully someone will actually take a picture this time so the entire Internet can see how clever and disgusting I can be.