100 miles

So, I signed on to do 100 miles in December. Mostly, I signed on because the month of December is normally a month I quit running altogether, opting instead for lots of high calorie latte drinking and sudoku solving.

It’s the 8th day in, and I’ve got 26 miles down. I know this doesn’t seem like a whole lot, but oh my holy gawd, it’s a lot. Would you like to know how I know it’s a lot? Here’s how: today, the amount of food I’ve eaten is now more than even *I* am comfortable admitting to. Before I ran 6 miles during my lunch break today, I ate two huge peanut butter cookies. Then, when I returned, I ate nearly a pound of pasta — literally. I know this because the box boasted it had THIRTEEN ounces (and there, you must read THIRT-TEEN with that double T, in honor of my lovely LooMoo) of gross frozen linguini and shrimp. Gross frozen linguini and pasta that I inhaled. I can’t even recount dinner, nor can I talk about the bag of potato chips and can of Pepsi B brought to bed. Just writing about not writing about it gives me  heartburn.

Also: Scrubs: Med School? Seriously disappointing, so far. Except that Dave Franco is in the cast. Edited to add: and except that they used a Weepies song at the end of the episode tonight.

the most appalling thing I’ve read in a while

My dear LuMu posts today about how the horrible beast of capitalism has sunk its evil, disgusting claws into her soul. She’s purchased a running skirt. 

If I still lived next door to her I’d withhold all raspberry bar deliveries until she came to her senses and burned that shit.

tuesday night motorcycle club

We’ve (the adults in the house) been watching Sons of Anarchy on Tuesday nights. I cannot follow it, I cannot. The network of allegiances and enemies, the rules of the charter, the twisted motivations (who’s bad? who’s less bad?); I can’t keep any of it in my head from week to week. So when we tuck in to watch the latest episode, I kind of watch, but not really (I understand this strategy doesn’t help my inability to follow the plot, I do). Last week B was taking care of locking up the house and whatever during the first few minutes of the show. He came up to the bedroom and asked, “What’d I miss?”

I had indeed watched the beginning minutes, and so I reported, “Something about a gun deal…something about adult films…and then they rode their motorcycles somewhere.” It was the best I could do. And I could have been describing the entire series, not just the opening scenes to one episode.

Tonight I’m reading the Wikipedia entry for the show, which is not a shining example of the interweb’s collective authorship abilities. It’s been moderately helpful. But I still don’t really get it.

 

twitter’s killed the blog

It’s hard for me to muster a post longer than 140 characters, which then doesn’t, to my mind, warrant an entire post. I think in short bursts now when thinking about broadcast:

Reading Frederick Douglass for Rhetorical Theory tomorrow…must be for the 10th time. Still is amazing.

Sore from yesterday’s Hilly 6. My butt especially.

In the throes of advising at work. I’m getting better, but it’s a whole realm of academe I wasn’t prepared for.

Staving off anxiety attacks this week with about a 50% success rate.

And etc. I’m not really thinking (about broadcasting) the whys or discussion. 140 characters doesn’t really invite close examination through writing, it just has room for the grit.

Plus, I have to read Frederick Douglass again. I don’t really have time, anyway.

small victory

Big J plays hockey. You all knew that. He’s on a local in-house squirt team (squirt = 9-10 year-olds). He’d make the travel team in heartbeat, but the cost is double and the word “travel” means we’d be trekking as far as DE, MD, and NY (as well as all over PA) for games on the weekends. Maybe when he’s older and H can drive herself to all her events, then we’ll have time (and maybe the $$) for him to play on the travel team.

At any rate. This is Big J’s second year as a squirt, which means he’s about the biggest kid on his team, and he’s definitely the best skater. And I’m not just saying that. Big J is, like, amazing to watch on the ice. He goes from forward to backward in a sleek, side-switching spin and without missing a beat. He can stop with an effortless backwards lean, throwing a spray of snow up onto the boards.

He can walk just about any other kid down, and if he’s got the puck, no one’s catching him. Even though I’ve posted before about how much I love watching my kid play hockey, it bears mention again here.

They didn’t win today, but the one goal scored was a break away by the J-Bear.

punishment for skipping Thursday’s run

View this running route and more at RunThere.com

a [short but not unsubstantial] christmas list

A piano. I’m not picky. A small console, used — free, even — as long as it can hold a tuning and the action isn’t too heavy.

A Vic (AKA Garmin). This one is nice, but I’d settle for something cheaper or older, as long as it can tell me how far I’ve gone and how fast I’m going.

A second bathroom. We have, yet again, found ourselves living in a single-bathroomed house. We are seriously flawed in understanding our own limitations concerning home improvement. History proves that we do not learn from our own history. Said history suggests that we will 1) purchase a house based on “potential” and (low) cost 2) plan to use the money saved to capitalize on that potential 3) realize even with the “saved” money we don’t have enough to do what needs done to make the house even CLOSE to what it could be. And then 4) usually emerges as us frantically making upgrades to the house before we have to sell it. And PS: the house we find ourselves in how, while it is amazingly located and full of character, is already too small. The big and little Js have decided they no longer want to share a room.

*sigh*

 

 

ten hours of cartoon network

Please don’t call child protective services. Today the kids are off because of parent-teacher conferences. Since I have a strange teenager living in our house, I now am able to go to work without finding a babysitter on such days.

Except today that teenager has the slime flu, or whatever, and so she’s laying in bed half-conscious. But did I find a proper sitter for the boys? Nah. I’ve got a TV. During my lunch hour I stopped home and I observed they’d fed themselves Cup Noodles and left over pizza — I know this from the evidence left in the kitchen. But they were sitting in the exact positions on the couch and floor that I’d left them in this morning. They were dressed and warm and the house was intact. This afternoon I have to attend their conferences (I cannot bring them),  attend a budget committee meeting, and then work at the Major’s Fair on campus.

10 hours of TV is probably a LOW estimate.

doing lines

In writerly company, if it comes up, I refer to myself as a “recovering poet.” The recovering part refers to my inability to stop, but that I’ve admitted I’m powerless and blah blah blah.

Actually, though, the recovering also refers to the kind of life I lived when I identified primarily as a poet. Few people I’m close to now, aside from family, knew me then. I was (I imagine) a kind of raging lunatic — or maybe a sociopath. I wrote poems like prodding fingers into wounds: insecurity? anger? oppression? Mine or yours, it didn’t matter, I was taking some spray paint to a bed sheet and hanging it on the front porch. And then probably telling you that it’s your fault you’re mad that I hung that up for everyone to see, because if you’re mad then SEE! I TOLD YOU I WAS RIGHT.

At some point I hit bottom and realized that writing, the prodding into hurting places all the time, would probably make my husband leave and my family hate me and my friends non-existent. I moved from the MFA to the composition and rhetoric program, and began the hard work of perspective shift. I read Where Ever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn and Peace Is the Way by Deepak Chopra. I read Thich Nhat Han and Pema Chodron. I read The Four Agreements and The Voice of Knowledge.

Now, if someone is driving like a maniac, I imagine (earnestly) they have a pregnant woman in the back seat in labor — or some other forgivable circumstance.

That is background for the links I have to present today: I love this, and I’m trying to reconcile this, and I want to write poetry again, desperately. And I want to be happy.

And I’m so lucky to have this sort of conundrum.

things I did while I wasn’t blogging that I would have blogged about, had I been blogging

1. Sang at a wedding with my mom and sister. Our act now includes djembe. We work for Starbucks coffee and the excuse to travel.

2. Ran the Virginia Beach half marathon. Solitarykitsch offers a moving account.

3. Spent some late summer mountain time writing, writing, writing.

4. Learned what epizeuxis means, really.

5. Grew my hair back out. I nearly look like myself.

6. Developed a curious OCD habit: washing my face >3 times a day, with serious abrasion. When I run now, the sweat burns my face. But still the scrubbing.

7. Settled into an easy 3-day-run week. 4 on TR; 6+ on Sunday.

8. Wondered if I’d quit blogging altogether. It seems to be a funny thing, the place so many of us are getting to where we can’t, or don’t, write in these spaces we once found so engaging and useful.

9. Have tried not to think about #8 too hard, especially the second “funny thing” about it, since I’m still

10. Writing a dissertation about mom blogs.