caution: knees

I'm going to have to take it easy on the downhills. Tonight, for the first time, I felt the strain on my knees as I pounded my way back down from the top of Namsan to the bus parking lot just below the summit. The pain was a possible harbinger of agony to come if I don't watch myself. Running downhill is an impossible, laughable prospect: I'd end up like Bruce Wayne in "The Dark Knight Rises," utterly without knee cartilage and needing a robotic splint to hold my leg together so I could deliver powerful side kicks.

I started out late tonight, but ended up with over 15K steps before midnight rolled around. We new faculty members received our ID cards yesterday afternoon, and I had wanted to see whether mine would work to open locked doors on campus at night. Unfortunately, I discovered—even before my nighttime walk—that my card didn't work: it was after 7PM when I left the faculty office, and I had wanted to lock up. Locking up requires a working ID card to set the door alarm, but when I touched my card to the sensor plate, a computer voice told me flatly that my card was "disallowed" (heoyong dwaejiantseumnida). So I need to run my card by our intrepid office assistant Tuesday afternoon; here's hoping things are fixed by close of business the same day. (It might behoove our office staff to test the ID cards, to see whether they work, before they actually issue them to us. Having to go back to get the card checked amounts to wasted time and effort.)

Aging, as they say, is no fun. As I get older, I find there are more and more things I need to watch out for. Now I have to add my knees to that list.


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