what's on my bookshelf?

I have a small bookshelf by my bed. It was intended by its makers as a cd/video/dvd rack, but I find that it holds trade paperbacks, mass market paperbacks, and smallish hardcovers well enough. It's on the opposite side of my nightstand from my bed, and I keep a candle on top. The thing is that these books actually don't see much traffic - they're books I like enough to keep out, and I have to admit that Borges gets taken out every month or two, but most of the rest sit waiting for me to read them, and most of them are "browsable." The books I'm actually reading are usually either with me around the house, or they are on the floor beside my bed, or on the "passenger side" of the bed. (Yep, I'm one of those single girls who sleeps with books. Don't even start on me.)

Anyway, here's what's currently on it:

Einstein's Dreams - Alan Lightman
Monkey Brain Sushi - Kodansha short story anthology, contemporary Japanese writers
The Mother of Dreams - ditto, this one is female Japanese writers
Five Women who Loved Love - Saikaku, more Japanese short stories
Grapefruit - Yoko Ono, arty little book
A Look Into Japan - little guide for tourists, pub by some Japanese tourism bureau
EVERYONE IS A DESIGNER - weird little book.
The Ambassadors - Henry James - I don't think I'm ever actually going to read this
Middlemarch - Geo. Eliot - nifty little 2-book set of small hardcovers
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire - Amanda Foreman
The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry
The Love of Stones - Tobias Hill
The Silmarillion - Tolkien
some tolkien linguistic guide that I can't read the title of from here - red cover
After the Quake - Haruki Murakami
Goodbye Tsugumi - Banana Yoshimoto
The Histories - Herodotus (Penguin)
The Lord of the Rings - Tolkien, 3 tpb set with bound-in foldout maps
Collected Fictions - Borges
Deus lo Volt! - Evan S. Connell
The Alphabet vs The Goddess - Leonard Shlain
The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene (I will probably never finish this. Lost 30pp in.)
bottom shelf - lots of thinner books I can't see too well from here. Some are organizational books - it's significantly ironic that a small portion of my general clutter is in fact comprised of books on clutter reduction. Also bell hooks' feminist theory: from margin to center, some general small books on astronomy, a guide to "postmodernism" (in philosophy and criticism), the book get a financial life!, and a couple of maison ikkoku collections.

the icepick cometh!

I think I was free of The Headache for a whole 36 hours, before it came rushing back to me around midnight. It pokes behind my eyes, makes my ears pop every time I swallow, makes my head constantly feel like it's been set on my neck at the wrong angle. Worst of all now is that I can FEEL it in my shoulder, the root of the tension that's causing all this. Medication hasn't helped. Heat hasn't helped. Massage hasn't helped. Rest hasn't helped. Food hasn't helped. I'm about to go drink some tea and see if maybe the caffeine will help, but I doubt that it will. (this is the sort of thing that I used to see a chiropractor for, but just at the moment I can't afford that - maybe I'll go do The Cheap Method, which is to go to a nearby playground and find some bars from which to hang upside down.)

I think I'm going to pack some more (I half-assedly packed a box of books earlier, in that I put the books into the box but have not properly packed or sealed the box or in fact done anything of the remotest use aside from now having a box of books sitting willy-nilly in the middle of the floor).

I am becoming a pretty little organized thing.

With a monstrous headache.

(Oh, yeah. Added to my general musical shame and embarrassment, we have the fact that I realized yesterday that I have liked every single song I've heard so far from Christina Aguilera's most recent album. *groan*)

on the marketing of back-related snake oil

http://www.backworks.com
http://www.backbenimble.com

Now, I'm not saying that all these things are snake oil, or that they help no one. There's a number of items (a lot of the more expensive exercise equipment and back-arc stuff) that I've never tried. However.

I own a - get ready for this -

- thumping massager with heat
- full-length heat and massage pad
- wet/dry heating pad
- several body wraps (rice bags you heat in the microwave & wrap around your neck/shoulders)
- tempur-pedic pillow
- various small handheld quasi-spherical hard things that you're supposed to smoosh into your back (massagers)
- pillow-top feather bed
- body pillow
- "total gym"
- gigantic rubber exercise ball (to lie backwards over)
- plethora of muscle-warming creams
and additionally have use of one of those hot-stone massage kits.

Let me tell you something...

NONE of them help that much. Sometimes the heating pad and rice bag help, sometimes lying back arched over the big rubber ball helps, but not one of these things is a magical panacea for back pain (and neck pain, and headaches, and sciatica, and fibromyalgia pain, and etc). A lot of things that these sites sell are just variations on the basic theme - support belts (which are great if your problems are lower-back-related, and not in your shoulders or neck), weird miniature hills you're meant to stretch out across, various types of mattress, pillow, bedding.

The only major category of Back Crap that I've tried, liked, and don't own is the gravity inversion table. I think that's probably going to be what I'm asking for this Xmas. (I keep wanting a PS2, but I'd probably use the inversion table more often. I'll hang upside down by my ankles and watch Planet of the Apes movies or something.)