involution

2011-11-18T00:01:00.001-05:00

Nearly eighteen months after leaving academia, I'm still sorting out my feelings about it. That will sound odd to you, maybe, because didn't I spend years trying to leave? And wasn't leaving the breakout from nearly a decade of allowing inertia and other people to run my life? And isn't everything so much better now?

Yes, absolutely, to all of them. I don't wish I hadn't done it. But academia is not like a regular job; it's like a relationship. An abusive, miserable relationship in my case, but still a relationship. And if you end a decade-long relationship, even if for very good reasons, you're going to experience some fallout. I know that leaving was the right decision because I didn't experience any of the fallout right away; I was relieved and happy. Really, I was thrilled. It was like I'd gotten my life back - except more so, because actually I had gotten my life, period, for the very first time.

But I have flashes. I talk to friends who are professors and grad students and postdocs. Many of them are miserable, but still, they talk about their work, their grants, their conferences, and it feels bittersweet. That life was home for me for so many years, and it's gone. I helped a friend compose a letter to a professor I know well, asking for a postdoc, and the professor was interested, and the friend got excited, and I felt jealous that I don't have a promising scientific career ahead of me. And just tonight, I was Facebook surfing and saw a not-really-a-friend's new photos of the dog he and his girlfriend just got, and I was a little bit jealous of the clearly-now-permanent girlfriend because I had a flirtation with the guy that I was more interested in than he was, and then I was a lot more jealous, of the guy, because I saw that he has recently become an assistant professor at a fairly prestigious school.

It's unclear whether I left academia or whether it left me. There are at least two stories. The first is that I wanted to get out for years but never had the guts, that my faculty applications were halfhearted and I turned down two semipermanent between-faculty-and-postdoc gigs because I wasn't willing to do what it took to get a permanent position, that everyone I worked with and for thought I would be a great professor one day but I couldn't be bothered. The second story is that I sweated blood for nine years as a grad student and then a postdoc, that I gave up relationships and hobbies, that I thought about my work day and night, and it wasn't enough. I applied for every faculty position in any department that resembled my field, even if the school was in Idaho. I went to interviews where I was treated like dirt and nobody had the courtesy to email me and say they weren't going to hire me.

Usually the truth is between the two sides of the story, but in this case both sides were true. I was a very good scientist, and I worked very hard, and it wasn't enough to succeed. Perhaps if I'd been more persistent and less prideful, willing to take another temporary position, I'd have wormed my way into something. Perhaps if I'd been smarter, if I'd made different choices about advisors, if I'd picked hotter research topics. Maybe if government funding didn't keep getting cut, or if I could blend in with other scientists by being male. Whatever it was, it was something I couldn't, or wouldn't do. Looking at other people's interesting research and prestigious faculty positions and exciting conferences and being jealous is like looking at your ex-boyfriend with his new girlfriend and feeling that way: completely natural, but not a feeling that should necessarily be acted on. My relationship with academia was messed up, and it needed to end. Would it have been nice if the relationship could have been healthy and happy and successful? Sure. But it wasn't, and whether that was because of our fundamental incompatibilities or particular mistakes, the relationship has been ruined.

I'm better off without it. I haven't found a replacement, exactly. I like my current job but don't love it the way some people love scientific research or even the way I sometimes loved scientific research. But I'm a much better and happier person now. My life has opened up in ways I never would have thought possible even two years ago. I feel younger and freer; my days match better with how I imagine myself. And best of all, I feel a sense of agency. If I don't like something - my work, my apartment, my city, my hobbies, my friends - I have the ability to improve it. It's easy to scoff at that, say that everyone controls their lives, but for years I didn't. I ceded control of everything to the dysfunctional relationship that was my career, and I didn't understand that it was not going to voluntarily return my agency to me.

I'm still a work in progress, of course. I haven't found my One True Career, and I don't know if I ever will. I'm prone to occasional bitterness, as tonight, about the way my past career ended. I feel jaded, used up, and a way behind. Other people much younger than me have progressed much further in my current line of work. But I don't think I came away from it empty-handed, and when I do find my True Career Love, I'll be a better worker because of what I learned from my first, horrible, marriage to academia.

another training post: on relinquishing goals

2011-09-08T10:59:00.000-04:00

Training has officially gotten rough, and I think I'm now at the point where I can expect to feel tired, sore, even slightly sick as often as not until the marathon is over. Tuesday I made my first attempt at a run since Saturday's 16-miler - I believe I wrote about how short, slow, and unpleasant that was - and it left me feeling tired the whole day. I postponed Wednesday's run to the evening, and by midafternoon I was feeling reasonably good.

Last night's run went very well, in part because it was done an easy treadmill. I ran seven miles, and although I cramped a bit around mile three, I slowed down briefly and then felt fine. I took a break at 4.5 miles because the treadmills only let you run for 59 minutes so I'd need to take one at some point, and then I ran the last 2.5 miles faster. The last mile of the run I felt extremely strong and fast (although I happened to be running next to a mirror, and I did not *look* very fast). The worst part of the run was coming home to an exceptionally painful shower and difficulty sleeping due to friction burns.

I'm not sure if I'll run again before Saturday. I could run tonight, although I would prefer to do yoga, and I dread aggravating my skin further. I could run tomorrow morning, but my long run is Saturday. I feel like it's kind of pathetic to not be getting in at least 3 weekday runs, though.

The biggest obstacle I'm having in my training this time around is my own expectations. The first time I trained for a marathon, four years ago, I'd never done anything like it, and as long as I was able - somehow - to get through my longs runs, I felt like I was on track. I was slow, but many of the other runners - and the only other marathoner - I knew were slow. It was hard, but I was mostly just surprised that I could do it at all.

I'm much stronger now. It's easy to forget that. But my long runs involve more hills and much less walking. I haven't been timing myself, and I didn't time myself last time, so I don't know if I'm faster. But one of the most vivid memories I have of that training cycle was sitting down on the side of the road and crying twelve miles into my first fifteen-miler because I was so tired and in so much pain and had so far still to go - and I've now passed the fifteen-mile mark in this year's training with no such episode, so I'm at least mentally tougher.

But I keep comparing myself to other people, or to how I would like to be. I read all these running blogs, written by people who are much stronger and faster than I am. These people eat twenty miles for breakfast on Saturday and then run five miles on Sunday to "recover", and they don't seem to suffer from sore, weak, or tired legs in the days after their long run, or the inability to sleep through the night without waking up to eat, or anything else unpleasant.

Of course this comparison is unhelpful (except insofar as I can learn from their experiences). I'm not running to be as fast and strong as other people, or even as fast and strong as an arbitrary measure of how I "should" be. I don't know what I'm capable of at this time and on this course, since I haven't run a marathon recently or here. And I'm not advanced enough as a marathoner to reasonably set a goal on this race, other than to run strong, do my best, and not let the race beat me.

2011-06-15T23:32:00.000-04:00

I learn so much, sometimes, from reading my own blogs and journals and poems. Or rather, I learn two things: how much I've changed, and how much I've stayed the same.

In so many ways, I've stayed the same. For something like fifteen years - basically, the entirety of my reflective writing life - I've had the same doubts and worries and insecurities, the same moodiness, the same gallows humor. Some of my closest and most challenging relationships have endured for a decade or longer. Even the central issue of my twenties - whether and how to continue in academia - while resolved, still informs a large part of who I am and the decisions I make.

But in other ways, I've changed. Reading my writing from five and ten years ago, seeing how agitated and terror-stricken I was, is almost painful. Of course this is an unfair sampling - this spring marks roughly the fifth and tenth anniversaries of my graduation from college and my completion of grad school, and many people find such transitions overwhelming. Three years ago, when I was moving to New York, I was almost equally overwhelmed (although in a more beaten-down way).

Still, I feel a lot more equilibrium these days (yes, really, the last year or so is what passes for calmness with me). Somehow in the last few years I've grown into myself more. I wouldn't say that I have a better handle on my life, exactly - I still couldn't say, with any kind of definiteness, what I want to be doing or where I want to be doing it, in ten or even five years - but I do have a better handle on myself. Ten years ago, I didn't really know who I was, or even who there was to be. Five years ago, I knew who I was, but everything in my experience suggested that I was aberrantly deficient in every way that mattered. Now, I have more sense of what my strengths are and how to deal with my weaknesses, and I'm comfortable enough with the whole package not to focus (most of the time) on why I'm not exactly like what I imagine the median person must be.

The bigger evolution,has not been in how I see myself, but in how I see my life. For so long, I viewed my life as something that happened to me, a set of tests that I could pass or fail, with each performance dictating the next leg of the path. I rarely thought of it in terms of my own choices. Circumstance and the people around me and my own lack of gumption kept me from really making most of the major decisions about my life in my early twenties, and it was a habit that became more and more ingrained even as I struggled to shed it.

But that has been, really, the story of the last few years - somehow, after I had resigned myself to it never happen, I took control of my own life. I took up hobbies nobody had ever imagined for me. I made unlikely friends. I traveled to places I never really thought I'd see. I escaped what had begun to feel like a life sentence in a modestly comfortable cage (that would be academia). And now, after almost three years here, I find myself with a totally different life than I'd ever allowed myself to imagine. A life full of evenings with friends and excursions to the theater and international travel, with a good but stressful job and a tiny, overheated apartment, the kind of adult life I would have imagined hopefully at the age of twelve and probably never afterwards. It is a life I really, really enjoy.

Five years ago, dreading leaving the town that I hated and that had become home, I wrote that I loved travel because it was so anonymous. On a bus or a plane or a train, nobody knew anything about me. They didn't know me as the grad student with tons of papers and no job offers, or the disappointing daughter, or the weird ex-roommate. I was just a girl reading a book or drinking a coffee. And that's how I've felt in New York, as well. Nobody knows me here; all the friends I could make in a lifetime are a vanishingly small fraction of the people I see in one commute to work. To all the people around me, I'm just a girl with a kindle. I could be smart or stupid, disappointing or exemplary, weird or normal.

I could be anyone at all. Even, somehow, after all this time, myself.

2011-04-24T22:22:00.000-04:00

I was at a dinner the other night where people were telling horror stories about emergency rooms and paramedics. A girl who'd had food poisoning talked about being ignored for six hours as she lay on a cot throwing up into a bucket, not given an IV or any fluids, because they thought she was just a kid strung out on drugs. She'd ended up at a hospital in a bad neighborhood, apparently, and - according to another girl at the dinner - most of the people in the emergency room would have been kids strung out on drugs. Still, I pointed out, they would have been kids strung out on drugs who needed help, and everyone nodded but they weren't really listening. They kept talking about how incompetent and mean paramedics are, how emergency rooms don't help anyone. And maybe they're right, for the most part. But I had to leave the room for a minute, because it reminded me of my only experience with paramedics and emergency rooms.

I would have been twenty-four. It was springtime, probably just this time of year. I was asleep and my phone kept ringing and I kept getting up and ignoring the call. It was four in the morning and the call was from my close friend and former boyfriend, who was having trouble in his relationship with another woman. But he kept calling back, and finally I answered it. I think you'd better come over, he said. So I got my car keys and, still in my pajamas, drove to his apartment less than a mile away. When I got there, I could tell right away that he was drunk, but we talked for fifteen or twenty minutes - about the girl, how she'd left him for good, how he'd tried to stop her by force and scared himself with his own violence - before he told me about the pills he'd taken. I told him we had to go to the hospital but he refused. I pleaded, and argued, and bargained, but he kept saying no. He went into his bedroom and I called 911 from my cell phone. I couldn't give his address, though - he lived in a big apartment complex and, while I knew the name of the complex and his apartment number and exactly how to get there, they couldn't dispatch an ambulance without the exact street address. I'd have to call back from the landline, I was told.

My friend had taken his phone with him into his bedroom, and I was afraid of him, but I was more afraid of what would happen if I didn't do anything. So I stormed the bedroom and wrestled the phone out of his hands. I think he must have been fading then, or afraid of hurting me, because he was trying to fight me off and I wouldn't have been able to get it away from him if he'd been more coherent. I ran back to the living room with the phone, dialing, and talked to the same dispatcher - this was a small town, a small emergency service area - and with the landline she could pinpoint my location, and then my friend came out of his room and was fighting for the phone back.

The paramedics came. I don't remember how long it took. My friend had gone back into his room and I was afraid to go back there. There were men, it seemed like a lot of them, in heavy boots. They went into his room and brought him out. They all seemed much too big for the apartment. I was sitting on the couch then, not really awake, and there were policemen who told me they needed a statement. They needed to know who I was, why the drinking had started, who the other woman was. His life - my life - our lives - seemed tawdry when I was telling it to an officer of the law at four-thirty in the morning. I didn't have proof of anything. I just knew what my friend had told me, which was that there had been a lot of alcohol and a lot of different kinds of pills. I was afraid it wasn't really anything meriting an ambulance, that I'd wasted their time.

I hadn't wasted their time. Outside - this must have been only a few minutes later - they were loading my friend's stretcher into an ambulance. They asked him which hospital he wanted to go to and of course he didn't know. I wouldn't have known either, and I wasn't nearly unconscious with an almost-lethal cocktail of drugs. One of the paramedics took me aside and told me that he wasn't allowed to give advice, but if it was his friend lying on the stretcher, he'd want them to go to a particular clinic. So I told my friend to request that clinic, and he did, and that's where the ambulance went.

I followed the ambulance. I sat in the waiting room. It was clean and quiet. It wasn't like an emergency room on television, because this wasn't New York or Los Angeles. It was the middle of nowhere in Illinois, and my friend was the only person there who was close to dying that night. I used the restroom, which was a single room like you'd find in a midpriced restaurant, except with specimen jars. At five-thirty I called my mother. Is everything okay? she asked me. The last time I'd called her in the middle of the night, my best friend from college had died in a car crash very late on her fifty-fourth birthday. Of course everything's not okay.

A lot of time passed. I saw my friend; he seemed really cheerful. They'd pumped his stomach and he was going to be fine. I called his other close friend, who came to the hospital. They decided to transfer my friend to another hospital fifty miles away, where his veteren's benefits would pay for a longer stay. He'd be in a psych ward. He seemed happy about this.

What I remember about that night is mostly two moments - in the apartment, talking to the policeman who had seen so many lives as wrong-headed as mine, and outside, with the paramedic, who put himself in our shoes and told me what to say to help. I don't know what the other hospitals in town were like, but I know that the one we went to was nearby, and clean, and saved my friend's life, and maybe if he'd ended up somewhere else the night would have spiralled into even deeper horrors.

My friend lived another six years. He got over the girl, eventually. He met someone else and they were together for a long time, and frequently they were happy. That relationship ended, as relationships do. He moved to another city and took another job. He had other friends, other joys and sadnesses. Last summer I went to Paris for a month, and he was going to be there too during that month, and look me up. I worried - with what now seems like an inane self-centeredness - that his intermittent desire to rekindle our long-ended relationship had returned.

I remembered the last time we were in a French-speaking city together - Montreal, six months after our breakup, for a conference. He'd sent pastries to my hotel room. It was the kind of romantic gesture women, stereotypically, dream about, and he knew I was no exception. If the right man had done that for me, if a random man had done that for me, I would have been swept off my feet. But he wasn't the right man, he was worse than a random man, and the gesture meant nothing good to me. I hated myself for not being able to love him, for being the sort of person who hurt someone so thoughtful. The pastries were obviously expensive and well-made, but in my mouth they tasted like sawdust, and I couldn't bear to eat them.

I needn't have worried about a repeat of this, because he never made it to Paris. He died at the end of June. I was in Reykjavik, and I learned it from Facebook. It never gets dark, at that time of year, and nothing about the trip seemed real. He died of an overdose, it appeared, and nobody was specifying how, or how intentional. It was in the early hours of his thirty-seventh birthday.

So his life is over. Has been over, for nine months. He was a person with problems long before I met him. But he was also a person with so much sweetness. When he and I were together, he did everything he could to keep me from feeling pain. He watched stupid television shows on Lifetime with me and made chocolate-chip pancakes. He came to my best friend's wedding halfway across the country even though he knew I was about to break up with him. One time, in the heat of summer, when I was in a bad mood, he put on all his old army gear, including a giant heavy backpack, and hopped across his living room like a rabbit in order to make me laugh. I don't think he really loved me - I don't think he really saw me - and I know I didn't love him, but he was good to me, always, even when I wasn't very good to him. He deserved better than he got, better than he set himself up for. I think most of us do.

Everyone is Being Cool Without Me

2011-04-13T23:53:00.000-04:00

Nothing good ever happens on a Tuesday, and yesterday was no exception. After a particularly frustrating day at work and the umpteenth consecutive day of being ignored by my office crush, I decided that it was time to treat myself and use the Leonidas gift certificate my parents gave me for Valentine's Day. (Oh, you are thinking, how sweet! Her parents gave her chocolate for Valentine's Day! You are thinking this because you do not know my mother. This was Guilt Chocolate; it was Why Don't You Have A Boyfriend, Preferably a Jewish Lawyer Boyfriend, To Buy You Chocolate So Your Parents Don't Have To Get You a Gift Certificate Chocolate. But I figured it would still taste good, once I actually went and purchased it.)

So I set out from the office to Leonidas, except it is not, as my mother told me, "right next door"; it is about fifteen blocks away. Three blocks into my walk it started to mist, and by the time I got to the shop it was definitely raining, and I definitely did not have an umbrella. Plus, due to my eternal-yet-irrational optimism, I had convinced myself that something good would happen that day and so was dressed nicely, which is to say not-waterproofly. Plus-plus, I arrived at the store on the stroke of seven, which turns out to be when they close.

So, no chocolate. I set off for the subway station, which was another fifteen blocks (Midtown is not evenly tiled with subway stations, and half the ones it does have only seem to go to Brooklyn). This was a really fun walk, because the rain intensified and became a thunderstorm - a really loud, kind of scary one. By the time I got to the train station, I was drenched, and the first train that came was too full to get onto. On the second train, I ended up standing right next to a woman I know vaguely and spent a few hours with last weekend - and she didn't recognize me. When I smiled at her, she looked at me like I was a crazy person (which is exactly what I must have looked like) and moved away.

So, crappy evening, and nothing about its crappiness was specific to my personality or circumstances. Bad days at work, bad weather, commuting woes, the failure of chocolate to simply materialize in one's apartment - these are pretty much universal annoyances. But the way they all coalesced into a perfect storm of crap was, I think, uniquely enabled by New York. You live here long enough and you forget that it is not, actually, a regular feature of life everywhere to be pushed and shoved and squashed, to climb a ladder or unfold your couch when you're ready to go to bed, to be constantly competing with nine million other people for every square inch of space and every penny of rent money and every iota of attention or interest or humanity. You forget that a concrete path between a road and a river does not constitute nature and that dog poop on the sidewalks is not evidence that you live in a great neighborhood. You also forget that you could survive without ballet and Broadway and access to every amazing thing ever created. Or you don't forget, and you know that eventually you'll have to leave.

Sometimes I think about where I'll go when I leave the city. Seattle, maybe? San Francisco? Boston? I know I prefer cold to warm, and I want to be near mountains or water or both. It should be a real city, or close to a real city, but also close to somewhere with space. And I have to be able to find a job there, and there has to be a decent population of single people over 30 for me to hang out with. It would be nice, too, if I could afford to buy a smallish house with a yard big enough for dogs.

But, really, those are not my criteria. They're considerations (and having a job is indispensable), but they don't rule much out. Everywhere has some sort of nature or culture and most places have both, there aren't too many places where real estate is more expensive than here. No, the real consideration is the type of people who live there, the attitude of the place.

What I want is related to - is the antithesis of - the latest manufactured buzz of the New York Times: FOMO (available online here, although because I am a New Yorker I read it in print, a definite benefit of residency). This stands for Fear Of Missing Out, and it refers to the sense, when you look at your friends' Facebook posts, that they are all happier and cooler and more interesting than you. They are at the latest gallery opening or the hottest nightclub; you are in your pajamas watching reruns of The Office. They have an adorable baby in a pink snowsuit with its own ears; you have a four hundred dollar cell phone that nobody except your parents ever calls. They are reading interesting books and making new friends and taking vacations to France; you are going to work and playing sudoku and eating leftovers with your roommate. Whoever you are, whatever you are doing, at this moment somebody - and probably somebody you met once, at a bar or your sister's high school reunion - is doing something infinitely better.

This feeling may be familiar to all users of Facebook or even all people, but I think it's particularly strong in people who live in New York. New York is a city run by people who have to have the best, do the best, and be the best, and the rest of us either go along for the ride or settle in for a long haul of being told we're not good enough. (See: Penelope Trunk here and elsewhere on her blog. Also, a lovely and talented (erstwhile?) reader once said, either here on her own blog, that part of the reason she left the city was that dating was difficult because men were always looking over her shoulder for the woman who might be just a little more... whatever... than she was. I had no idea what she was talking about at the time, but in the years since I have thought of this comment always and it seems more and more true with every man I date.) New York is a place where - yes, I have become ones of those people who says this, and believes it - you can see and do and be amazing things, more so than possibly anywhere else, and consequently it is a place where there is a lot of pressure to see and do and be amazing things all the time.

The thing is, I don't want to see and do and be amazing things all the time. Sure, sometimes I want to see a great performance or visit a world-famous museum or experience an outstanding restaurant or do some other of the things that New Yorkers think you can only do in New York and in reality you can do in any major city and a lot of minor ones. And sometimes I want to hang out with friends, and sometimes I want to practice yoga alone in my apartment. This is obvious to you, if you live anywhere but New York, because you probably have an apartment big enough to lay down a yoga mat in.

There's nothing stopping me from living my life the way I want to here, and I mostly do, but this isn't the best place for it. This is a city made of crazy aspirations and driven by the fear of missing out, where just the thought that someone else might, somewhere, somehow, be doing something a little more awesome drives people to deprive themselves of sleep for years on end, inhale a pack of cigarettes' worth of pollution every day, and work and party themselves into a frenzy just to stay a little ahead of the curve on some hybrid skinniness/wealth/hipness scale, and wake up ten years later wondering where the time went and why they haven't figured out, much less accomplished, anything they really care about. This is a city composed almost entirely of a profound insecurity that nothing - no salary, no party, no apartment - will ever be enough to mark its bearer as a success and that all of it, the money and the women and night after night of awesomeness, will not keep one single filmmaker or investment banker or trust fund artist from eventually, and at the exact same rate as his peers in tiny towns in Wisconsin or possibly faster, getting old.

When I leave New York, in two or five or ten years, it will be to go somewhere that isn't driven by fear. It will, hopefully, be somewhere with good weather and good public transportation and a decent feeling of community - but more importantly, it will be somewhere that isn't about being beautiful or successful or awesome. It will be somewhere that's about being happy and healthy and helpful and yourself. And when I go, I'll still have Facebook, and I'll still have all my Facebook friends, in New York and San Francisco and Pennsylvania and Japan, and when I log on I'll see their status updates, and I'll know that everyone I've ever known, plus the nine million total strangers who live in New York City, is being cool without me, and I won't care at all.

2011-04-02T23:38:00.001-04:00

People occasionally ask why I left academia. Actually, people ask frequently, but most of the time they are satisfied with the answers I give first - that I'd been doing it for ten years and was ready for a change, that I was tired of living in tiny towns and working all the time and getting paid next to nothing, that I wanted a job that was interesting and absorbing but that could sometimes be just a job.

All of those are true answers, but they're not really the answer. I'm a passive person; I don't make big life changes out of boredom. I knew I was giving up a lot in the way of excitement and material comforts, but most of the time I simply didn't care; even now that I have access to them, I'm not a big one for excitement or material comforts. And academia wasn't as much work as it could have been; as a theorist, I could do less work by being smart, and I always had other things in my life. So, while those things are all true, in the sense that I appreciate those benefits of being out of academia, they're not the reason that I left.

I was talking to a younger colleague today; after a couple years in the workforce, he's considering going to grad school for a PhD and wanted my take. I told him, honestly, that it's not always an easy life, even if it looks like one; that it requires dedication and focus and that your advisor has much more power over you than any supervisor in a regular job, and much less incentive not to abuse that power. I also told him that I though he's someone who would enjoy it, because he really is dedicated, and he's very good at what he does.

He asked me why I left, and I gave him the standard answers, and he didn't buy it. "You gave up doing research just so you wouldn't have to live in Idaho?" he asked, incredulous. This is a guy who should be getting a PhD, because to most people in this city, being able to live in New York instead of a tiny town in northern Idaho is reason enough to change careers. But then again, he's right, because when you love something, you follow it wherever it takes you, even to the middle of nowhere.

And then he told me what got him thinking about grad school: he was watching a documentary about waste disposal, and saw the marine biologists talking about the effect of trash on the ocean ecosystem. And he was thinking, these guys just get to be out there, on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, enjoying the sun, and they're improving the world. And meanwhile I'm a desk all day, trying to write better code so the company can make a little more money.

And he's right. Kind of. Those guys get to be out there on a boat, but they also have to be out there. They don't get to go home every night; instead they sleep in bunk beds and eat dehydrated meals. They don't get to see their spouses and children every day; if they're single, they have a hard time dating. They can't run five miles every day after work, as my colleague does now, and they're probably always smelly and wet.

But, sure, they're improving the world. Maybe, a little bit, sometimes. Not as much as they wish they were, and not as much as my colleague thinks Because that's the thing about academia, and maybe about all science - progress is slow, and frequently there is no progress. At a corporation, there are incentives to always be doing more, getting better, staying ahead of the game - even if those incentives are just money. But in academia, for everyone not working directly towards tenure, the incentives are fuzzier. Sure, yes, there's the drive to contribute to the world, to make a difference, to make it better. But that contribution will come in years, maybe a lot of years, maybe too many years for you to be around for, and it's a pitiful counterweight against the desire to go home, watch television, get some sleep. For really good scientists, the love of learning and exploration is the animating factor. For others, it's the desire for renown, or a sense that science is fun, or simply inertia. Or there simply is no motivation at all.

I had a difficult relationship with my work throughout my academic career. I was never as devoted to it as most people start out. I liked it, and I was good at it, and I have anything else I really wanted to do, and frequently that was enough. I liked learning new things that nobody else had ever learned. I liked assembling my work and discussing it with others. I liked reading papers and attending conferences. I had bad days, band months, even bad years, but so did everyone else. Whenever I got close to leaving, I told myself that I was doing something important, that I was making new knowledge, and that compared to this no job as a keyboard-presser was ever going to measure up, and that the joy of discovery outweighed the hassle.

After grad school, I spent two years as a postdoc in each of two groups. In the first group, I performed research with applications to drug delivery (how do we get drug molecules to the parts of the body - the cells, or the parts of the cell - that need them?) and separation mechanisms and the general area of nanofluidics. It's not a super-hot field, but it's an area of active research. The work I did had two distinct parts, and before I left I wrote up two papers, which - in accordance with standard practice - were to be revised and submitted in the next few months, while I ramped up work on my next project.

Except the papers didn't get revised and published. My former boss ignored them, and he ignored my emails asking about them, until after a year I submitted one paper without his assistance or approval and dropped the other. This wasn't just one bad experience; it happens all the time. Work isn't published because the student can't write, or the advisor is too busy or dislikes the researcher or has too many grants to write. During my nine-year career I spent at least four years doing research that was never published (that's four papers that I actually wrote, and a couple other papers' worth of research that never got written up) for reasons mostly unrelated to its quality.

In this case, the problem with my papers was that they were mundane; interesting and relevant work, but not exciting. My former advisor already had tenure and didn't need any more bread-and-butter papers. If he was going to be famous - which was the only place there was for him to go - he needed revolutions, and my work wasn't revolutionary. Most work isn't revolutionary. And most revolutionary work isn't as revolutionary as it sounds, either. Most of it is built on years or decades of small, quiet, incremental ideas and experiments and calculations that lead to a cataclysmic insight - or maybe just to a buildup of small, quiet, incremental ideas and experiments that are, as a whole, very important. But when those incremental findings don't see the light of day, when they're not published and not discussed, other scientists can't build on them. Nobody can do different or more specific work based on those findings, nobody can develop a theory to explain them or an experiment to test them, nobody can be inspired about a whole new line of thought. It's as if that work - that year or two years or four years of labor - never happened.

Work goes down the drain everywhere. My company could pull the plug on a project I'm doing that I think is useful and cool, and that would kind of suck, but I would accept it more easily. My job is fun and satisfying and remunerative, and if sometimes my work doesn't lead anywhere, well, eh. But in academia was job was less fun and less satisfying and way less remunerative; it was usually a slog, and it was frequently hellish in a variety of ways, and the payoff was knowing that I was doing something that really mattered. And when suddenly, because someone I used to work for was busy and absent-minded and not terribly fond of me, I realized that a lot of the work I had done was not going to matter at all, it was hard to accept the bargain I'd made.

I may not be improving the world now at my job, but at least I don't hate the world anymore, which is probably an improvement for the people around me, at any rate.

2011-03-30T22:44:00.001-04:00

One of the things I don't like about New York is how people are always leaving it. It's an exciting and dynamic place, and people are always moving here or coming to visit (one of the things I do like about New York is how frequently I see friends who don't live here, sometimes entirely by accident), but it's not the kind of place, for a lot of people, that is suitable as a permanent home. It's a difficult city to put down roots in because the soil is always shifting. This summer a good friend of mine will move away to begin a marriage and a master's degree in Kansas, and the tragedy and beauty of the city is that, although I'll hopefully stay in touch with her, her place in my life will quickly be filled. Nothing stays empty here for long.

I've lost one friend already this year, and in a more upsetting way. A woman I'd become friends with last spring, and become much closer to over the course of the fall, stopped speaking to me abruptly in January over my unwillingness to enter into a relationship with the IB. I feel that this is unfair and a little bit ridiculous, but I'm still bothered by it.

My friend - ex-friend, I suppose - is an intelligent, vivacious, likable person. Our lives were very different, but we used to get together once every week or two for lunch or a drink or a shopping expedition, and we became each other's sounding boards, in large part because our lives were so different. Her husband and I always had plenty to say to each other, and we liked each other's other friends. (Yes, it sounds like I'm talking about a guy I used to date, but the similarity of friendships to dating relationships is hardly accidental.) I knew her friendship would change when she had her baby (which happened a couple weeks ago, according to Facebook, ever the go-between in these situations), that I'd see her less and that she'd always be preoccupied, but I didn't expect it to be so thorough, and I didn't expect it to start three months before the baby's birth.

I understand it, though. She's not the first friend I've had whose gotten married or had a child, or for that matter taken another job or found an amazing hobby. People's lives change, and their friendships ebb and flow. New mothers have more in common with other new mothers - at least, in some ways - than with single women, and people who make lots of money have more fun going to fancy places with other people who make lots of money than eating stale pizza with postdocs. People change when their lives change - but, also, people like to think they've changed. They like to think they've outgrown or evolved past or transcended who they were, and sometimes that means outgrowing the people they were once friends with. If they didn't - if, while working their amazing job and living in their huge house and raising their three children, they still wasted their time with people who were important to them in college, people who don't have any of those things, well, that's a little bit threatening, isn't it? Because if you can still respect the people who don't have the things that you think make you respectable, maybe those aren't the respect-bestowing things after all.

It takes a lot of guts to be exactly who you are, even when other people are different, and that seems not to be less true at thirty-five than it was at fifteen.

I've almost-lost friends to this sort of thing before. My best friend and I went through a rough patch - okay, we went through approximately two dozen rough patches, but I'm talking about one in particular - right about the time she got married. There were a lot of components to it, involving all the expected bridesmaid/bride clashes plus my own unhappiness in my then-current relationship, as well as some more difficult stuff going on in both our lives. But the part I remember most clearly is a comment she made to me over instant messenger that she was more interested in selecting the correct sofa for her apartment than in discussing my "non-committal relationship issues". What stung so much was not that she was more interested in her life than in mine, but that she really did view the most emotional aspects of my life as less important in an objective sense than the decorating quandaries of her own.

Fortunately, time tends to even things out. Eight years have passed, during which time I've bought two sofas and she's had two children and both of us have weathered plenty of ups and downs in all areas of our lives. While we don't always understand each other's viewpoints, she's a good friend and an impartial one, it's been valuable to me to have her in my life if only to have a differing viewpoint as well as some idea of how a person with her life lives. I can't imagine what our friendship would be like now if we'd followed similar paths in our twenties.

I'm sad that my ex-friend and I seem destined not to develop a friendship like this, but I know there's nothing that can be done. It takes patience to tolerate your friends when they are living your lives in a way that seems blatantly wrong to you, and it takes a lot of honesty and humility - more than I have most of the time, anyway - to accept that maybe your choices aren't right inherently or for everyone, or even - possibly, some of the time - for you.

vacation: a recap

2011-03-29T00:09:00.000-04:00

I recently returned from a trip to Costa Rica. Because I've been so intermittent about blogging lately, I'll save background information and generalized catchup for a future post (the sort of much-anticipated backwards-moving series of recaps that generally never gets written) and just tell you about this one trip.

I went on a group tour with Caravan, which is about as white-bread and cliche as it sounds, but it was mostly alright. I wanted to go to Costa Rica because several of my friends had been there and had amazing photographs and stories, and I was overdue for a vacation, but I didn't have a lot of time to plan. So I signed up for the "Costa Rica: Natural Paradise" tour, ordered binoculars and hiking boots and waterproof pants from L.L. Bean, tossed them in my bag along with a random assortment of clothing and more sunscreen and bug spray than could possibly be reasonable (no, really... my bag weighed 32 lbs when I checked in at Newark and I think around 8 lbs of that was bug-and-burn ointments) and headed off to San Jose.

It turns out, Costa Rica is super-bright - I was very glad to have my new prescription sunglasses - but not all that hot. Even though the latitude is only about twelve degrees, there weren't a lot of times that I was too warm in pants and a t-shirt. However, it is very very wet. You know how they say, "it's not the heat, it's the humidity?" Well, in Costa Rica, it's not the humidity, it's the fact that much of the time you are actually inside a cloud.

Quick itinerary (at least, what I can pick out from the blur of awesomeness):

Arrival in San Jose, the capital, where they were in the middle of a holiday that lasted - depending on whom and when you asked - a day, a weekend, a week, or a month. I get the sense they have about thirteen such holidays per year. The primary celebration consisted of a daylong music festival in a park; the musicians were multinational despite the festival being about Costa Rican heritage. The attendees were mostly very young and could have easily been Spanish or French.
Visit to a volcano, with actual steam coming out of it. In some parts of the country, there is rainforest, and in some parts, there is "cloud forest", which is what they call it when you are so high in elevation that it cannot actually rain, but it is just wet in the air all the time.
Visit to a coffee plantation, with actual coffee samples (turns out, they are happy to give you free chocolate or coffee or whatever, almost everywhere, and the distribution center is usually the place where you can buy more of it to take home)
In the same vein, but now largely departing from chronology, visit to a pineapple plantation, where I discovered that I like pineapple when it is not soggy, and also a visit to a banana plantation, where we learned about the bizarre and interesting lives of banana plants and the men who harvest them.
Visit to another volcano, mostly from a distance. Visit to a "hot spring", which was more like a set of hotel swimming pools (except warm) than like I imagine a hot spring to be.
Stay in a rustic hotel reachable from civilization only via dirt road and 90-minute boat ride. "Hotel" was actually a group of cabins separated by paths, kind of like girl scout camp. The coolest parts of this were being inside my cabin and looking out at the trees, and seeing monkeys on the way to meals and iguanas by pool. While we were there we went on a number of boat rides and such to view the more skittish wildlife.
Stay in a way-less-rustic resort by the beach on the Pacific side, where I went horseback riding. This part of the country was much dryer, and looks a little like I would imagine the African savannah to look.
So much wildlife: monkeys, birds - including ibises, which I had thought were mythical, crocodiles and caymans, iguanas and other lizards. Also so many plants, growing out of the soil and the water and each other.
Probably some very important insights and conclusions and the like, but it is far too much after my bedtime to think of what they are now.

2011-02-12T00:55:00.000-05:00

The comment on my last post still confuses me. When I first read it, I felt like I should apologize for ending my post on a bit of a down note; later, I felt persecuted for not being cheery enough. Now I feel like the comment is part of the point I am trying to make.

A big part of your life, especially when you're youngish and especially when you're single, is how you tell it to other people. People expect a certain script, or one of a small set of scripts, and when they meet someone who doesn't follow it, they can get a little bit confused and very inquisitive. They want to know why: Why did I leave academia? Why did I choose my current career, and apply for the job at my current employer? Why do I live in New York, and why do I like it? Why am I single? Why don't I have a closer relationship with my brother? Why do I tell my mother so much? Why did I stop being a vegetarian? Why do I run? Why do I write, or why don't I? People are endlessly demanding that I explain myself, and the small variations in how I express myself at given times seem to lead everyone in my life to have totally different ideas about who I am. Worse, sometimes I can't answer their questions, and the general response to that seems to be that if I can't explain who I am, then I must be wrong about it. I feel like this is trying to begin with, and more so because people whose lives seem easier to understand don't seem to have to deal with this as much. But I also feel like I should not take it personally, because probably people who I perceive as nosy and domineering just want to make sure I'm happy.

And I am happy, in general. But more important than being happy, at least to me, is being real. Sometimes I don't have an answer to "why are you single?"; worse, sometimes I have depressing answers (I can imagine the lists my exes would give, for example; "too awesome to settle down" does not top them). Much of the time, I don't care what the answer is. Single is what I have been for my entire adult life with only brief t interruptions, so it's kind of like wondering why I have eyebrows. Sometimes, I'm very glad to be single; I truly don't know how or even if I would deal with having another person just around a lot of the time, and I'm frequently thankful that at the end of the day I don't belong to anybody else and nobody belongs to me. I do have periodic pangs of wistfulness, on a quiet Sunday when it would be nice to have someone to read the paper with or on Valentine's Day when it would be nice to treated to a romantic surprise, but these pass when I find something else to do or think about.

Still, there are the occasional moments when I am struck by the magnitude of my potential for aloneness. I guess to an extent I buy into the fairy-tale idea, where you meet Prince Pocket Protector and you fall in love and get married and then, well, that's sort of it. You slot comfortably into place, and your life is just, from that point on, solved. I know that isn't the case, that married people - which includes many of my friends - have plenty of confusions and dilemmas, some the same as single people and some different, but still.... it seems like your life is classified and constrained, maybe not in a way that would actually make me happy, but certainly it sounds comfortable. And the thing is if you don't get married you just go on, and on, and on. With more stories and more adventures, and every phase of your life has a different cast of characters and possibly a totally different scenery and of course that's all great, but sometimes - the hugeness of time, and the sheer magnitude of stuff in my life that nobody really experiences but me - it's just a little bit... daunting.

There is a little part of me, about the same size as the part of me that believes in reincarnation, that thinks the right man for me is out there and that I will, still, someday, meet him.* If he exists, he is probably exactly as anyone who knows me would imagine, and we would live the life together that anybody who knows me would expect, and othen the pieces of my life will start to look like they fit a little better because, anyway, there will be one bit that people can understand. The reason my last blog post was a little bit sad - and I think the awesomeness that is my new life can stand up to a little bit of sad - is not that only a small part of me believes that this man exists. It's that, even if my life would be easier - more friends, more money, possibly even better health - with the right man, even if my life would be happier with the right man, more and more of me knows that this easy, happy, pocket-protected life is not the right life for me.

----

* Now is as good a time as any to mention that, whoever this man might be, he is not the IB. He came, I saw him, I experienced a rare moment of clarity in which I realized that he is a decent and reliable and trustworthy person who is offering me a perfectly reasonable kind of relationship - companionship and common interests and the security of having known someone for a decade and still not being totally sick of each other - and it is emphatically not enough. I do not think he will return.

2011-02-01T23:23:00.000-05:00

I.

Today I had lunch with someone I went to high school with and haven't seen since; in fact, most of my interactions with him were probably in eighth grade. He was in New York for a few days - one of the things I love about living in New York is that so many people come here to visit - and for whatever reason, after well over a decade, we decided to catch up.

The yentas among you are now assuming I am about to tell you how wonderfully he grew up, how intelligent and interesting and attractive he is, and also how interested in me. In fact, he seems to have turned out reasonably well, although less geeky and more oily than I would have expected. If he were single, we might both be interested enough to pursue further acquaintance.

In reality, of course, he is not single, because nobody my age is single. Which is not a major loss since I barely know him and until a couple weeks ago hadn't thought of him in years, and all in all it was a nice lunch and, who knows, he might come back to New York sometime and we might have lunch again.

How he got to be not-single is what gets to me. Basically, he went to a foreign country for work, met a woman there, and brought her back. As I understand it, she gave up her career and basically her life to be with him, and now she follows him around during his work-related travels. Presumably this makes them both happy, but something about it bothers me. I would like to say it is solely that such an existence would not appeal to me on either side, and therefore my narrow little mind doubts it can work for anyone else indefinitely, and that I worry that they will join the ranks of those who waste years or decades in a marriage that isn't working for them.

But it is also, of course, partly, the very old and very worn annoyance that in my simplistic mindset of beatific equality, intelligent, interesting, geeky men are supposed to end up with intelligent, interesting, geeky women, women who of course are not me but with whom I might feel some commonality, and of course they rarely do. Intelligent, interesting, geeky men, like all other men, are not interested in intelligent, interesting, geeky women; they are interested in beautiful and nonthreatening women, and railing against this is somewhat like railing against dogs for playing in their own shit. It's how they are, and it works for them, so while I might consider myself intellectually superior if only because I actually realize that physical beauty and human merit are not equal, at the end of the day it is still they who are playing happily in shit and me who is cleaning it miserably off my shoes, so who's really putting their brains to work here?

Overdone analogies in which I unfairly compare relationships to canine excrement aside, this is an old story and an annoying one, and it wouldn't go any further except it reminds me in a way of myself.

II.

I'm still seeing my gentleman caller, the much-younger one who plays the guitar. He continues to be wholly inappropriate for me. We had a conversation very recently in which basically we determined that (1) it does not seem to be running its course as quickly as either of us had expected, but (2) due to differences in age and lifestyle, there is a limit to how real it can become, which is rapidly being approached. We also determined that (3) we each have some sense that we would be holding the other back and preventing the other from having the experiences we should be having if we continue seeing each other for too long, but also (4) neither of us wants to stop just yet. So that is all wholly inconclusive, although in reality there is only one way for it to go, and it will go there pretty fast I think due to newly-relevant scheduling issues.

But I'm not sorry about it. He's been good for me, in part because of the differences in our age and lifestyle and in part because of who he is. He's made me happy. He said, once, that he hoped he would renew my faith in love, which clearly he has not, but I think he's come as close as might reasonably be hoped in a few months of this sort of thing.

I've also learned a lot about the people in my life from being with him - or, rather, from seeing their reactions to my being with him. Most people have been supportive; if I'm happy, even if I'm doing something silly, they're happy for me. But a few people have been critical, and while I can't say I'm surprised at exactly who, I was surprised at the strength of some reactions. Two people have cut off contact with me entirely, basically because they believe I should not be wasting my rapidly-waning moments of plausible appeal, in which I ought to be trying to attach someone more suitable for permanent capture, with someone who is clearly neither suitable nor desirable as a long-term partner. Another is barely speaking to me, for basically the opposite reason - she thinks I should live a life of absolute solitude rather than pursue interactions with anyone who does not absolutely meet all my (read: her) most unattainable standards. And none of these people, believe it or not, is my mother, whose heart I have refrained from breaking by telling her about this affair.

The real reasons, as usual, for these people being upset with me have very little to do with me. They are trying to live their own lives in certain ways that they have decided are correct, and to the extent that it is a difficult or frustrating or regretful task they are taking it out on me. But I have also noticed - from long, miserable experience - that there is no use bringing it up to them. Some people will always disapprove of me, a list that is apparently growing to include not just most of my family but also some of my formerly-good friends, and if it is not because I am dating someone I am not going to marry, then it's because I'm dating at all, or because of my career or where I live or how much or little I work out, or my height or my weight or my shoe size, or what time I get up in the morning, or the order in which I eat my m&m's. Nothing is too big or too small for people who are in the business of making themselves feel better by objecting to other people's lives.

Which of course brings us back to my objections to my former classmate. If he's happy, and she's happy, then who am I - a person who doesn't really know either of them - to roll my eyes? Even in the semi-privacy of my own blog? Their relationship cannot possibly be any more doomed or self-destructive than mine. And anyway, why should it bother me even a little bit that a person whom until now I never thought of has found happiness with a person whom I have still never met?

The obvious answer is the one I already alluded to, that men like him should be marrying women like me, but that begs that question, because how do I know this wife of his isn't actually an awful lot like me? Which brings us to our answer: I know she is nothing like me because if a man - no matter how intelligent and interesting and geeky - appeared from a foreign country and wanted to take me away from my life and my career and marry me, I wouldn't go. If a man appeared from next door and wanted to take me away from my studio apartment and marry me, I still probably wouldn't go. Nobody marries women like me, because women like me do not get married. Instead, we date the most inappropriate men we can find - men who can't deal with commitment, or with women, or with their own laundry - and when we accidentally, despite all our best efforts, find someone who might have a shred of potential, we start conversations about whether maybe we should break up because otherwise it might or might not turn into something.

And so the moral of the story is what is rapidly becoming the obvious answer to what is rapidly becoming everyone's favorite annoying question to me: Why am I single? I'm single because that's who I am, and I'm not interested in being the person I would be in order to attain, maintain, or retain a relationship. Anyone who doesn't feel that way is, male or female, is fundamentally dissimilar to me, and I suppose there friendships that are simply not going to be able to span that gap.

2011

2011-01-02T11:13:00.001-05:00

Last year was a good year for me. Not always a fun or easy year, but a year in which I accomplished a lot. Most notably, I upgraded from a job I disliked and a career I was unhappy about to a job I enjoy and a career I'm excited about. In addition, I had a unique travel experience, spending a month in France preceded by a few days in Iceland (truly awe-inspiring) and Frankfurt. I also made significant strides in developing my local social circle in New York.

In 2011, I'm not looking for big changes. A lot of what I want to do is consolidate my gains - learn the ropes at my job, make more friends. But there are some areas in which I'm hoping for continued or renewed progress:

Running. I ran a lot in the first half of 2010, but in the last six months other priorities (travel, the new job) have taken precedence. I'm not completely out of shape, but I haven't been training with any seriousness. Since I'll be running a marathon in November, this will need to change - and soon, as I'm running a half-marathon in three weeks. (I'm giving myself permission now to wimp out on that, but hopefully it will kickstart things for the year.)
Travel. I am planning a major trip in the next few months - a ten-day tour of Costa Rica. I'm also hoping to take another major trip in the fall or early winter. In addition, I'll be travelling to visit family and attend a couple of weddings. This doesn't precisely count as travel, but I'd also like to join a hiking group and take a few days hikes (when it gets warmer) - I enjoy that sort of thing, but it's hard to organize by myself since I don't have a car or a ton of outdoor experience.
Social life. A girl can never have too many friends! Especially in New York, where they are endlessly reshuffling and moving away. At the moment I find that I have plenty of people to do things with, but fewer people I consider "real friends". Hopefully this is just a matter of time.
Clothing and other possessions. I have noticed that I have slightly too much stuff, and that a lot of it does not make me happy. There is resistance to getting rid of much of it because it is nominally useful, but it does not actually serve any positive purpose for me (i.e. I have some perfectly good clothes that I do not like, or that do not flatter me, or that I have been wearing twice a month for years and am sick of). I am trying to gradually get rid of things, which is less stressful than doing a single massive purge, and to not buy anything that I don't love. The idea is not primarily to have less stuff, but to have only stuff I really want to have.

In the sense of making resolutions... well, of course I would like to get up at 5:45 a.m. every morning and go straight out of bed to the gym, and then eat nothing but whole grain flax seeds and unsweetened yogurt and go to bed at 10 p.m., but this is an ongoing effort. More relevantly, I have noticed I have a tendency to avoid making decisions; this is a bad habit that stems from fear of making an uncorrectable mistake but often results in the even-less-correctable mistake of not deciding anything at all. I am working on making decisions in small intervals to try to conquer this.

2010-12-17T23:29:00.001-05:00

I have a dilemma. It is one of those things that seems to be near-insoluble to me, but that seems trivially resolvable to everyone I have talked to about it. (Of course, they do not agree on what the trivial solution is, which perhaps suggests it is not as trivial to think, but who am I to argue with the people who think everything can be boiled down to whatever the answer they have already chosen is?)

I mentioned on this blog that the IB was in town several weeks ago, and I also mentioned that he was in a relationship-wanting phase of our friendship. He has been this phase with increasing frequency and intensity for a few years, the main obstacles being (in rough order of increasing severity) the thousand-mile distance between our homes, my periodic unavailability, his inconsistency, and my general lack of interest. Over the weeks since his visit, he has been more consistent than usual - more consistent than ever, I think, except when we first met and might have actually been having a normal relationship - about staying in touch. I've been replying to his emails and texts in large part because I don't find correspondence burdensome; I don't mind being in regular contact with him, but I don't particularly crave it.

He is coming back to the area for ten days over the holidays, because his parents live here; it would be reasonable for him to make a day- or weekend trip to New York. He has done this before, and we discussed him doing it again. But it seems a little more serious, perhaps because it would be over New Year's, perhaps because it would be the second visit in as many months, perhaps because he has become unrelentingly clear about his intentions.

The IB is a good guy, really a catch. He's intelligent and successful. He reads for pleasure and enjoys traveling. He's a good talker and a good listener. He doesn't have many hangups, and he's adventurous enough to be good company in most situations. However, I can't seem to get on board. I'm not opposed, exactly. I understand, intellectually, that his thinking makes a lot of sense. We have always enjoyed each other's company, there have been intermittent periods of non-platonicness that have seemed to have potential, and now that he has decided finding a partner is the big item on his agenda, I'm a promising - perhaps the most promising and/or only - candidate. It is a perfectly reasonable way to go about choosing something that will be important in your life, such as your car or your home or, I suppose, your spouse.

I'm not rejecting the idea because of anything superficially unappealing about him. The problem isn't the amount of money he makes or his looks or his confidence level (none of which I would classify as unappealing anyway). The problem isn't even that he lives somewhere I don't want to live, or that I cannot seem to get interested in sleeping with him. Maybe the problem is just that I've known him for so long that I don't find such a dramatic shift in intentions plausible, especially unaccompanied by any substantial shift in the tone of our interactions.

The good thing is, well, how would I like to feel when I am with someone who is going to be my partner? Happy and confident and safe. I feel all of those things when I'm with the IB. But also, I would like to feel stimulated, like I am growing, like I have to grow a little bit to keep up with him. I don't feel that way with him. I feel relaxed, which is also good, but a little bit too relaxed. Like I can go ahead and be my worst self and it's okay. I don't want to always have permission to be my worst self.

Also, I am not in love with him, but I suppose that's immaterial.

Finally, there is an obstacle that should not matter but, a little bit, does, which is guitar boy. Things have intensified, not necessarily to a point at which I would call him my boyfriend (although that is a little bit because of how ridiculous it would be) but probably to a point at which it would not be cool to spend a weekend with an old flame in an attempt to rekindle the relationship. It is obviously ludicrous to compare these two men, and it would be insane to forgo the a rewarding long-term relationship for an exciting but short-lived fling. Except that the fling is making me happy, and I am not convinced that the rewarding long-term relationship would.

on being good

2010-12-15T22:54:00.001-05:00

I have a lot to say and very little excuse for why I haven't said it yet, since I do have a decent amount of free time. But I'm tired, which makes me forget what I have to say.

At some point there will have to be a retrospective, because 2010 was a hell of a year.

The biggest thing I have learned this year is that in life there are no brownie points.

I'm big on brownie points. This is perhaps because I screw up a lot, so I need them. But it's mostly because the way I'm constituted makes me always want to be looking over my shoulder, checking if I am earning all the gold stars. I like to be thorough; when I play video games, I like to kill all the bad guys rather than just dodging them. I don't like to test the system; if I'm told I absolutely have to be at work at 8:30 on the dot every morning for training and it takes half an hour to get there, I'll leave at 7:45, every morning, even after I see other people waltz in at 8:32 and 8:35 and 8:45 with no or few consequences.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's good to be conscientious. And there are certain areas of my life in which I could afford to be more conscientious (these days, alarmingly, that's the Not Eating Yogurt-Covered Pretzels For Lunch area). But overall I tend to live as if there's some sort of gold-star chart at the back of the classroom, and maybe when I die there will be an award for the girl who has amassed the most. And what I've learned this year is, well, there had better be such an award when I die, because there is certainly not going to be one before that. Nobody ever says, "gee, you were at work early every morning for sixteen weeks, even the morning the entire subway system flooded. Great job!" Similarly, there are not prizes given out for never taking a long coffee break, or for going to the gym every morning, or for getting good Xmas presents for your whole family. In general, there is no reward for being good.

So being good has to be its own reward, which means you have to choose what of it you do. Going to the gym before work is its own reward about three days a week. The other days, sleeping an extra 90 minutes is a better reward. Getting good presents for people is its own reward - but paying extra to ship them faster is not. Getting a project at work done is rewarding, but staying until seven just because everyone else is that day, is not. Going to bed early... well, somebody needs to find way to bundle that with something I actually want to do.

Gift Hierarchy

2010-12-03T00:46:00.001-05:00

The best gift is one that the recipient wants very much but does not realize she wants. How could person not realize what she wants, you ask? She might know this thing exists - it might be a book she hasn't heard of or a gadget she didn't know of. Or, even better, she might simply never have considered how much such a thing will improve her life. This is a very hard gift to find, highly recipient-specific, and is even harder for well-adjusted recipients who know their own desires well. I generally don't try to shop for such gifts for a given occasion because they're so rare, but if I see or think of something that will be perfect for someone, I buy it immediately or make a note of it for later.
Special category for romantic gifts: the first romantic gift between a couple of a given romantic-gift category, or an unexpectedly-but-welcomely-romantic gift (i.e. between people who are not yet officially involved).
Something the recipient already wants but would never allow themselves to spend money on because they are perceived as too expensive / luxurious / hedonistic. This gift is best if it is actually a very small luxury and the means of the giver and recipient are similar. (Example: buying $30 worth of expensive chocolate for a good friend, when $30 is a typical amount to spend on each other, is really sweet. Buying a $200 bottle of wine for that friend, when $200 is their food budget for the month and play money to you, is - in my opinion, anyway - less impressive. The beauty of this gift is not that it is a wealth transfer; it is its permission to indulge oneself in a way one wouldn't ordinarily allow.)
A gift elaborating on a known fondness of the recipient (i.e. some people are always happy to have books; others are always happy to have jewelry, or new music, or gadgets) in an unusual, giver-specific, or especially welcome way. For example, gifts bought on exotic travels or made by the giver. This is the highest realistic goal for most gift-giving occasions.
Other romantic (relationship-appropriate) gifts.
A "this made me think of you" type of gift - i.e. one whose tone, humor, character, or etc. made the giver think of the recipient. Sometimes these are things the recipient likes; frequently they are not. But they're usually interesting and thoughtful.
------------------------------- line between good gifts and okay gifts -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A gift elaborating on a known fondness of the recipient in a typical way.
A generic gift. Many people keep gift closets full of scented candles, bath products, and nonperishable foods that they give out - over the holidays or throughout the year - as hostess gifts, holiday presents for neighbors, offerings for the kids' teachers, and any other time a gift seems called for. These are perfectly good gifts if the only thing that needs to be said is "look! I got you a gift!"; otherwise they are disappointing for everyone.
Something the recipient has specifically asked for.
Money (if given by parents or older relatives).
------------------------------- line between okay gifts and bad gifts ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Most gift cards. A generic gift card, i.e. from Gap or Bed Bath and Beyond, has no advantages to the recipient over money and a few obvious disadvantages. Some gift cards are actually other kinds of gifts - for example, a spa gift card for a person who would never spend money on a spa visit is actually type 3.
A gift meant to improve the recipient. My parents are masters of this gift form. I have been carrying an electric wok around for the last four moves because they seem to think it is something that a person who lives alone and doesn't cook needs to have. In my current kitchen, it does not fit on the counter. They also like to give me cookbooks.
No gift.
Something totally orthogonal to the recipient's personality and interests, the kind of gift that makes you wonder if the giver knows you at all. Sometimes the only difference between this type and type 6 is presentation.
A gift for which the best, and sometimes only, possible explanation is that it was meant to hurt or offend. Closely related to type 14, but more negative and usually given to women, by their significant others.

I have three more holiday gifts to buy, plus cards to write. Fortunately, that will not be the end of the gift-giving because in January two friends have birthdays and I'm going to a wedding, and then possibly another wedding in March. I say "possibly" because this wedding is to be held in Palm Beach, at The Breakers, a resort so fancy even the website is intimidating.

the Pill

2010-11-30T19:58:00.000-05:00

I will tell you something that really shouldn't be controversial, but is: I'm on the Pill. I have been on the Pill continuously for over nine years, and I intend to remain on it for the foreseeable future.

If you are a sensible person, your response to this is, "okay... so?" Because this would be like me telling you that I take allergy medicine or fish oil supplements or dye my hair every six weeks: I choose to do it for reasons somewhere between purely medical and purely personal, at the expense of my insurance when I have good insurance and at my own expense when I don't, and the side effects and risks it entails are ones that a reasonable adult might accept.

However, many people I know seem to have totally different responses. The Pill, they say, is unnatural (often they say this while drinking apple martinis that contain absolutely no apple). Also, it will mess up my body and my "rhythms" and make it harder for me to have children and possibly lead to birth defects in said children if I do have them, and doesn't it make me feel weird to be controlled by medicine? Now, of course, most of these objections have been scientifically demonstrated to be bullshit and/or are completely irrelevant; moreover, almost all of them could be made for many other things. If a person who eats only organic food and uses only organic skin products and refuses to take any kind of medicine and so forth wants to lecture me about this, well, I don't know that I'll listen, but I'll at least respect where she's coming from. But it's a pretty weak argument when it comes out of the mouth of someone who's happy to engage in every subjugation of her "natural rhythms" that modern technology can offer, except one that relates to her reproductive organs.

I'm writing about this now because of this article (and response). The author here also manages to include a sort of "if you go on the Pill you'll forget to have children" argument - forget? really? what, is society going to stop reminding me for longer than eight seconds? please? - that is actually more ludicrous (in my opinion) than anything I've mentioned previously. Most people on the Pill still get a period every month, or every three months, so it's not like - to the extent that blood in your nether regions is womanly or motherly - we're missing out on this reminder. We just don't want to be pregnant in our twenties in such large numbers, and the Pill - now only one of the reliable methods at our disposal, and not the best for anyone who wants to be truly carefree - helps us to fulfill this desire. Women who wait too long to procreate may regret it (although the ones whose stories I read seem to mostly feel that waiting was their best option). But so may people who don't take advantage of their youth in other ways - and I don't see this author telling women to stop suppressing their "natural" urge to each chocolate while their metabolisms can still handle it.

in which I attempt to watch a Woody Allen movie, so as to educate myself

2010-11-28T20:58:00.001-05:00

6:29. I really wish I could like, or at least understand, Woody Allen. I've been able to tolerate some of his more recent movies, i.e. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (which might have been good, even, if not for the vaguely vapid presence of Scarlett Johanssen in place of an actual actress) and Melinda and Melinda (which I actually almost liked). You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger was, well, no more stupid and misogynistic than most of what comes out of Hollywood, so I suppose that's an improvement.

It's really vintage Woody Allen - the stuff that's supposedly so great - that I can't stand. I am watching Manhattan right now, or trying to, but the problem is that by six and a half minutes into the movie I'm already bored (from the actionless overture at the very start of the movie) and pissed off (from, well, Woody Allen). What would happen, so you suppose, if a woman with a massive ego and an unpleasant face made a series of movies about her sexual conquests? Also, I realize this movie was made in the 70's but I'm pretty sure statutory rape was at least frowned upon back then.

8:11 Seriously?? I don't know which of the two male characters I hate more, the one who is sarcastic about his friend's affair despite his own many affairs, or the one who has the "great marriage" because he's only had one or two affairs. Please tell me this is not how normal, non-movie men sound when there are no women around.

9:54. Young Meryl Streep. movie just got a lot better. Wait... how could she have been married to this turd?

14:59. Almost didn't recognize Diane Keaton / dark, curly hair.

Suddenly feel like less of a grave-robber next to Woody.

16:40: Realize where I got my rampant-feminist-trying-to-scare-off-men act: Diane Keaton. Love her.

18:42. Woody Allen was alive during WWII???

21:22. W says his first intelligent thing of the whole movie, that it is ridiculous for him to be sleeping with a child and he should stop.

25:51. W just told Diane Keaton she probably doesn't get many dates b/c she has opinions. Nice. Good to know nothing has changed in the last 40 years.

32:22. Of course, the female characters are not much better than the men. So naive. Women in New York aren't that nave these days, even on TV.

37:48. There is an hour of this still to go. HOW?

38:49. Life is too short. I give up. Still hate Woody Allen.

gifts

2010-11-25T22:15:00.000-05:00

I spent Thanksgiving in New York this year, because I have to work tomorrow so there isn't time to go to DC. I also spent it entirely by myself, which was mostly by my own design, or rather my intentional failure to design any sort of companionship. I could have gone to my cousin's house near Philly, but I wasn't invited until the last minute, and I didn't particularly feel like inviting myself even though my cousin is pretty relaxed and wouldn't have minded, and by the time she invited me I'd bought my Harry Potter ticket, which was a good enough reason not to trudge down there. I also could have tried to do something with friends; many of mine stayed in the city and either would have included me in their festivities or would have liked to have a festivity. But I needed a day off from people (I need a lot of days off from people) and especially from running around.

It was a good day. I slept in a bit, loafed around, did most of the catch-up tasks that usually occupy a full day on the weekend (which means I'll have a wonderfully free weekend). I ate rather more than is good for me, although not of turkey, and I did not go to the gym (tomorrow...). Both of my gentleman callers sent happy-thanksgiving tests, as is proper. My parents did not call, even though they said they would. Just now I came back from Harry Potter, which was not awesome but was worth seeing, and was pretty enough to be worth seeing in IMAX, and was only slightly insane.

I am particularly pleased because I feel like I've gotten a handle on the holiday shopping. I have purchased and sent presents to my grandmother, uncle, and father, plus cards to them and an aunt, and my mother's present is packed up to go to the post office tomorrow. Those are all the ones that must arrive at some time that resembles Hanukkah. There is also my brother, who is not really a gift person, and his girlfriend... maybe I will get them some kind of householdy thing since I didn't get them a housewarming present, although I have no idea what since (a) my brother is way more domestic than I am, and (b) they are Brooklyn-y and probably don't approve of consumption. Maybe mittens and coffee beans? Also there are a few friends I will buy gifts for, but this doesn't feel like an emergency quite yet. Finally, there are my two gentleman callers. I am hoping for gifts from them both, ((1) I informed the IB that he should do so, which I think is entirely fair since he showed up and announced that he wanted to have relationship in the month of November, and when he whined that he didn't know what to buy, I told him to get something on his upcoming trip to Hawaii. So the bar is fairly high for him and I do not feel bad about this at all. (2) I did not inform guitar-boy that I would like a present, and I think he is likely not to give me one, but if he shows up sometime in the next thirty days with a used book and a candy cane I'll be thrilled.) which means I must give them both gifts. Neither of them is particularly hard to buy for, but of course I want to find something that is just right. So I have a nice amount of shopping left - not a terrifying amount, but enough to keep me busy and happy for the next few weeks. Yay!

thankfulness

2010-11-25T12:01:00.001-05:00

The obvious - my health and the health of my family and friends; the fact that I live in a place and time where heat and hot water can be taken for granted, the problem with food is that there is too much of it, and I am not anybody's property.
The internet.
The fact that Black Friday occurs on the internet. LOFT is 40% off!
I am in the middle of a dental procedure requiring four or more visits, all of which have to be done on Saturdays because I can't take off work right now. This is of course unfun, but it reminds me how lucky I am that my big health problem is (1) occurring in my teeth (as opposed to somewhere scary or gross or surgery-requiring) and (2) is fairly minor and entirely fixable. I have lots of little things wrong with me (tooth decay, bad vision, etc.) but nothing scary or big.
I have a job. I'm not done with training yet (almost!) so it's impossible to draw definitive conclusions, but so far it seems like a reasonably good job. At worse, it is a job that pays the bills (and provides me with coffee and cereal to fuel all-night programming binges), and I am unlikely to get laid off in the immediate future. A lot of people don't have that.
Friends - I have some, and they are awesome.
Also awesome - my apartment, and my coffee maker, and my bookshelves.

(just saw the end of the TG parade... I've only seen little snatches in person and they are less good than watching it on TV, but some year I want to get up at 4 a.m. and see it properly)

2010-11-20T23:55:00.000-05:00

It has been a good weekend so far. Last night I went out with a gentleman caller (the young one) to Otto's, which is where you go in New York to pretend you are on a tropical island instead of a temperate one. Today after my almost-becoming-routine Saturday trip to the dentist (I am having what is apparently massive many-appointments-requiring work done to a single tooth. this tooth never made me particularly happy or unhappy before, but suddenly three professionals at time are entranced by it.) I met up with some girls from my meetup group to see an exhibit of costume jewelry and have a coffee. I knew (and liked) some of the people there and enjoyed meeting some of the others; the challenge, should I choose to accept it, is to transition some of these people from meetup-buddies to friends. This broke up around one, and I spent some time in the Union Square Christmas Market and surrounding shops, where I did a lot of semi-productive looking and purchased a Hanukkah present for my mother... so that's one down and about ten zillion (actually, about ten, plus cards) to go. Then I met up with a former gentleman caller for a very late brunch (perhaps more appropriately termed an early dinner). He brought his girlfriend, whom I did not know existed, and I'm glad he did - I like her quite a lot and she seemed to take to me, so possibly I will see more of them. It is always a shame, I think, when people who might otherwise want to be friends are unable to because they once dated; it's understandable when something really unforgivable happened during the relationship or the parties disagreed dramatically about its endpoint, but sometimes the problem is just awkwardness and confusion over the tenor and expectations of the friendship going forward. A third party can resolve this issue nicely.

I'm not sure what exactly I've been doing this evening - mostly a lot of catching up on mail and email and a bit of catching up on television. I'll go to bed soon, and tomorrow I will do some yet-to-be-determined combination of errands, holiday shopping, friend-seeing, and lying semi-comatose on my couch. Then it will be the start of what is reputed to be the hardest, most sleep-bereft three days of my training program (a stiff competition), so I should sleep in tomorrow if I can.

on writing, and hair

2010-11-17T22:44:00.001-05:00

I have totally not been keeping up with my nanowrimo benchmarks. I was at first, but got behind in the first week and then somehow didn't catch up over the weekend (okay, I know how - by not writing) and then just became less and less conscientious. At this point I've given up entirely - on the nanowrimoing, but not on the novel. There's no real reason I need to write 50,000 words in a month, since whatever I write is just for my own creative fulfillment, and clearly at this time I'm not in a position to be fulfilled by that much writing. But I'd hardly written anything since coming back from France, so it was a good way to get myself into it again. I'm trying to keep the same nanowrimo attitude of not worrying about whether what I write is good, which has served me well in the past, and write just a little bit - 300 words or so - every day I can. This is little enough that it can be done in ten or twenty minutes before bed, but substantial enough that I can keep up with the thread of my story... for the last few days, anyway, it's been working, and between that and not having a sink full of clean dishes and going to the gym more or less every other day (the question of "more" vs. "less" depends on whether yoga counts), I almost feel like a functional adult.
My hair. Sigh. It is in that stage, where it is too long to be short and cute, and too short to be long, and which seems to last years. I have not had a coherent work-hair policy so far; when I first started the job, I wore it down, but it was shorter, just above my shoulders, and if I applied a ton of styling product it was actually manageable. Now it is past my shoulders and the best I can hope for is "wild, untamed, and possibly carnivorous" (as opposed to "actively striving to take over the universe"), so I adjust my style based on its behvior. I have two basic options, I think: (1) continue to let it grow, wear it in bun or otherwise up at work, wear it down on weekends when it is behaving, or (2) get it cut short again and resign myself to maintaining a regular haircut schedule. I feel like I should decide and act on this by the time I leave training in 2.5 weeks... my hair looks better short than either long-and-a-mess or long-and-up, but it looks best long-and-not-a-mess (a look that requires inhuman amounts of styling product, plus not blowdrying, which means going to the gym at night, and also a lot of luck) and long is certainly the style in New York. Men like long hair, although they also like straight hair, spherical breasts, and vapidity, so I'm not exactly going for the win there. My mother prefers my hair short, as do most of my friends. The chief obstacle to short hair is that my work schedule is such that I can't reliably do anything at a particular time on a weekday, so I'd have to get it cut on a weekend, and from what I've heard this (a) is quite expensive, and (b) requires making an appointment far in advance. Also, short hair is more work, and I am lazy.

a very materialistic post

2010-11-14T22:08:00.001-05:00

1) My mother asked me, as she customarily does around this time of year, what I wanted for Hanukkah. For the first time in ages, I could actually think of things that didn't seem crazy to ask for.

2) Mad shopping karma this weekend! Stopped at Macy's Saturday evening to make a periodic check of the shoe department for the two pairs I've been trying to buy for ages - knee-high boots that fit my ginormous calves and navy pumps to wear with my navy suit. Found both, for $63 each. Today, stopped in Gap on a whim, thinking it would be good to have skinny jeans to wear with my new boots (this counts as necessary shopping because I have lost a little weight and now have only two pairs of casual pants that fit, and one is track pants) and walked out twenty minutes later with skinny navy cords for $43

3) on a non-materialistic note... oh, I don't know. it has been a strange weekend.

2010-11-12T20:47:00.001-05:00

Item: Today I received an email from my thesis advisor, asking how my career transition is going. He thought of me, he says, because the group went out for lunch to celebrate the graduation of the last person I knew. We only overlapped by a year and we've long since fallen out of touch (although I may send her a congratulatory email) but it was odd to hear. Usually people say that can't believe something has happened already; in New York it's particularly popular to claim shock at one's own advanced age. But I feel the opposite. I've lived in two cities and had three jobs, written a couple of bad, unpublished novels, run a marathon and two halfs, seen most of the major tourist attractions of New York, made and lost friends, been to five foreign countries, braved a career change and had dozens of major fights with my mother and been dumped by any number of men, and all that time she was in grad school? Really? It's not that she spent a unusual number of years in grad school - she didn't - or that I think her life is any less eventful than mine. I just don't know her events, and when I look back up my own life it seems like it has been, for the most part, much more eventful in the years since my PhD than in the years I was earning it.

Other Item: Currently visiting New York is the man formerly known as the IB. He is here with a friend of his, to see a show. I saw him yesterday and enjoyed his company, and I am going to see him again on Saturday. He is doing well: he has lost weight and grown a goatee, which looks unexpectedly good on him, and he is succeeding professionally. But he is sad, because he is alone, and he doesn't want to be, and the town he has to live in to do his work is making it hard for him to meet a woman he wants to be with. I feel bad for him, in a kind of abstract way. But, also - for a long time I wanted to be with him, to varying degrees, and it never worked out, and a significant part of the reason for it was his inability or unwillingness to be serious enough about anything for it to gel. It was never that he didn't like me or didn't find the idea of being with me appealing, but there was always something that appealed to him more than returning my calls or getting on an airplane or doing whatever it was going to take. It's true that usually this thing that appealed more was his job, or simply laziness, and also that I was not ever so terribly organized about the whole thing, but I felt disappointed by him a number of times. And eventually - not because of him so much as because of growing up - I learned how to be happy alone, at least to a much greater extent than he has, and I stopped taking seriously his periodic declarations of intent. Which I think he realized at some point and more or less stopped making. And, well, it is just sad, because the person he is now and the person I was a few years ago might have really made a go of it.

the first of presumably many holiday-season posts

2010-11-10T22:45:00.000-05:00

It has come to my attention that it is getting to be the holiday season. This comes as a bit of a surprise; this entire autumn has sort of gotten away from me due to so much going on at work, which is a shame because it is my favorite season and it is not going to come around again for a whole other round of seasons. For example, I celebrated my birthday by getting yelled at (along with the rest of my training class) for various trivial infractions at work and then crying in the ladies' (alone). I celebrated Halloween not at all, unless you count going to the parade (which I guess is half-credit). I will not be celebrating Thanksgiving, really, since I don't get the day after off and my family doesn't live a reasonable daytrip away (especially during the holiday traffic). Maybe I will stop by the parade, which goes near my house, and it is possible I will feel moved to purchase some sort of pie. (Not turkey. I don't cook, I'm never home and awake long enough to roast an entire animal, and I'm fairly certain my oven is more like chicken-sized, or possibly cornish-hen-sized.)

However, I will not be missing Christmas. This is partly because Christmas is not the sort of thing a sentient person can miss. And partly because I am extending the term to include the obligation to bestow Hanukkah presents on my parents, which they recently informed me will not be waived or postponed for any reason, including work obligations. So at some point between now and whenever Hanukkah starts (early December?) I must find acceptable gifts for the two of them, by which I mean appropriately priced gifts that they will like (or, better yet, approve of) and that can be transported through the mail without loss of integrity. This is frustrating as I have pretty much exhausted the things I can think of to give them, and they don't really seem to be developing new areas of interest. But I also know there are certain things I can resort to that they won't love but that will be acceptable, i.e. smelly bath products for my mother, nonfiction books for my father. These are the analog of the Macy's gift card they gave me for my birthday that I haven't used yet... it is not a bad gift, and at some point I will get something I would have gotten anyway but it won't cost me anything, so I am pleased to have it, but it is not the kind of thing that makes one light up with joy. Which in some ways is sadder than no gift at all, because gifts should make one light up with joy.

(huh... just titled this post, and it sort of hit home that... it's the holiday season??!!)

The question I am more concerned with is my brother's girlfriend. My mother is giving her a Hanukkah present (despite the fact she is not Jewish) and also a birthday present. I don't feel that I need to give her a birthday present, as I have not officially been informed of her having a birthday. But I should give her a Hanukkah present, right? If my mother is going to? But then, what? I like her, but I don't know her all that well. She's very sweet, but fairly ungirly; I don't think she would care much for scented bath products. I could give her a book, maybe, about... um. Anything to do with art is out of the question because she's more or less a professional photographer and I'm sure I have no taste. Hopefully my brother will have a Hanukkah gathering (it's pretty sad; my mother has basically put him in charge of making sure I have some sort of religious / familiar existence and/or eat a home-cooked food every couple months) and then I will just bring the two of them a really nice host gift; my brother isn't big on presents anyway. Or maybe *I* will have the gathering.

YES!!! I will have a Hanukkah party! My apartment is teensy, but it is laid out well (by which I mean there is a loft to hide things in, and the rest is a featureless rectangle); I can get 12-16 people in here if some are standing or sitting on the floor. I will invite my brother and his girlfriend, and a couple friends from my old job, and a couple friends from my new job, and my book club, and a few other people I know in the city. I will get my mother's sugar cookie recipe, and I will make Megan's macaroni and cheese (with my apple-walnut variation). It will not be a dinner party, per se, b/c there is no dining room table, but there will be dinner, b/c I haven't made the macaroni and cheese in ages (I can't readily make it just for myself, as I can't freeze leftovers). I will light the menorah! We will play dreidel! It will be excellent! I must go and plan it right now!

2010-11-06T03:42:00.001-04:00

I have been an unfaithful blogger so far, but it isn't entirely my fault - I've just come off a three-day project that completely wiped me out - after sleeping three hours wednesday night and not at all thursday - there's a two-hour period in the middle of the night I have no memory of, during which I apparently fixed a number of semi-major issues, so unless I've learned to code in my sleep, I was awake, although I am told I was extremely crabby, to the point of scary - and I went to sleep immediately upon getting home from work. On waking up at midnight (this was a bit sad, as I hadn't intended to miss the whole evening - I don't usually sleep five hours at a stretch even when I'm not exhausted, especially when people are texting me) I ate a giant meal (I also have no memory of eating in the past three days, except for Thursday night, although I assume there were other foods I just don't recall) and now I am feeling a little bit like a person again. After I finish this entry, I will take a nice hot bath and then head back to sleep, hopefully until just before I head to the dentist to have all my remaining tooth matter removed.

One of the many things I've been wanting to post about lately is gentleman callers, an endlessly fascinating topic about which I am always learning new and very basic thing. I had a gentleman caller for a couple months right when I came back from Paris who was, before he stopped calling, everything you could imagine wanting in such a person. He was intelligent, well-educated, and well-employed; thoughtful and considerate; pleasant to be around. He was a good listener and a good talker, he knew how to use tools and didn't mind moving furniture for other people, and he had an amazing apartment the perfect distance away from mine. Plus he was totally appropriate for me in every way. I was quite disappointed when he stopped calling - but about a third of the disappointment was confusion and hurt pride, since I had considered things to have progressed past the point when it was reasonable to simply disappear, and another third was sadness over losing the idea of such a gentleman caller, leaving only about a third of the disappointment as missing the actual caller himself.

It was not that there was anything wrong with him. It was not even that there wasn't anything right with him. There were a lot of things right with him, and - more pertinently, which perhaps was a big part of the problem - a lot of things right with the sort of relationship he was clearly looking for. But much as it would be pleasant to be the sort of person who is destined to meet a nice Jewish lawyer and get married and move to Connecticut and have 2.5 nice Jewish children, I don't think I find such a transformation entirely plausible. Maybe it's just something I would need to get used to - it took me half a decade to convince myself I was really capable of leaving academia, after all - but people around me have been getting married and having children for even longer than that, and I have mostly been skeptical that such an arrangement will every apply to me, at least in any recognizable form. (Interestingly, when I say such a thing to people I know in real life, at least female people, they immediately object in exactly the same comforting, condescending tone girls use to tell each other they are not fat. Is skepticism about one's desire or ability to form a permanent attachment to a human being - something which is clearly warranted independent of one's personality and history, given the divorce rate - the same thing as poor body image?)

I have a new gentleman caller now. He is very, very different from his predecessor, and totally inappropriate. He's - it's such a stereotype to be enthusing about this sort of thing, and I hope you'll appreciate the spirit in which I do so - a musician. A jazz guitarist. He also works various odd jobs to make ends meet, not spoiled-starving-artist things like barrista-ing but actual-labor things like carpentry. He smokes pot and says words like "awesome", and he is roughly twelve million years younger than me. It is, obviously, a very different sort of arrangement than with his predecessor, and one not destined for a long duration, but then, neither was that one, as it turned out. I just got to the point where I figured, why bother with all the boring bogginess of dating-as-extended-job-interview, which gets in the way of actually enjoying being around the other person? When I was much younger I would have wanted to date guys like this one, but I was always too serious about and intimidated by them, even on the rare occasions when they were interested in me, and later on I was mostly interested in guys with whom I had more in common. Now I feel like I can appreciate Guitar Boy without being overly invested, plus the whole arrangement has (from my point of view, at least) a kind of Samantha-and-Jared-in-Sex-and-the-City frisson of inverted gender dynamics and female empowerment. I knew I wasn't really excited about meeting ten zillion more bankers and lawyers, who in New York all seem to suffer from the same minor aversion to women and major need to appear cool in front of other men, but I hadn't realized quite how boring and pressurized proper dating had become until now.

i am trying to get in the habit of blogging daily

2010-11-03T00:14:00.001-04:00

...but as you can see it is very late. not even today anymore. so this will be equal parts brief and pointless.

1) election. feh. giant map of redness. i am not what anyone would call a rampant liberal, but it still terrifies me. too much fervor in any direction is not a good thing.

2) i need to decide very soon if i wish to train for and run a 15k (9 mile) race on december 19. the last few weeks have been bad with work, but before that i was running 3-4 miles, 3-4 times a week. i'm back to running again this week and i've definitely lost the (relative) ease that comes with doing it regularly, but it's not like i've turned into a giant tub of inertia. the question is less whether i can train to that point than whether i want to. i find my response is lukewarm, although this is substantially influenced by the fact that all of a sudden it is winter, and i am a big wimp. this is an annoying feature of all races - most of them are during some month that is not pleasant (that is, all the months except for september and may) and at some implausible time of the morning. i did a lot of races last spring, though, and it didn't kill me, and i am going to have to get over my laziness pretty soon to start training for the 2011 nyc marathon.

3) while i have been writing this, the republicans have won something like 15 house seats.

maybe, i'm back!

2010-11-01T23:14:00.001-04:00

There is no way I can catch up with everything I haven't been blogging the last several months, so for the time being I won't even try. At this point, I'm not sure I can even keep up. For one thing, at this exact moment I am supposed to be cleaning my horribly disgusting floor and then going to bed, and you can see I'm not doing that.

One thing I am doing, in theory, is writing a novel. I decided to try nanowrimo again this year, because I just don't have enough going on. If you aren't familiar with nanowrimo, it entails writing a 50,000 word novel(la) during the month of November, which boils down to 1667 words a day, which is not a lot of words to write in a day, but is a lot of words to write in the free time a normal person has on a typical day. I cheated by starting over the weekend, but I think this is reasonable since a 2000-word head start will hopefully keep me from getting discouraged the first time I have to stay at work past midnight (projected occurance: Wednesday) and therefore write zero words. As of now I've written 3,573 words, which means I'm just over 7% done. (Note there is no rule against the novel being really bad.)

Actually, I'm feeling pretty spiffy right now, because I have done most of the things I intended to do today, including going to the gym, writing my grandmother, and playing the piano. I've even had a nap! (much needed after attending, and getting semi-stuck in the subway on returning from, the Village Halloween parade) All of this is because I am no longer commuting to Princeton every day, which means I have an additional three hours daily to work, sleep, exercise, socialize, and keep the entropy-gremlins from taking over my apartment and/or life.

Now, I will close my computer - I've noticed it is a horrible time-suck at the end of the evening, when desultory perusal of facebook and various inexhaustible feeds seem much easier than going to bed - and battle the dust-bunnies, and then I will possibly get six full hours of sleep.

test post

2010-10-17T20:44:00.000-04:00

I am thinking of restarting this blog, but at some point I shuffled my accounts around and now I can't seem to get back in. So I'm testing the email posting mechanism I set up a while ago, to see if it still works.

2010-06-30T17:26:00.002-04:00

I've just finished packing my things to leave Frankfurt. Tomorrow morning I'll get on the train to Paris, and my month-long sojourn there will begin. The last few days have been exciting, eventful, and a bit stressful, but they were just an opportunistic prelude. Tomorrow is the beginning of the real thing.

Few people have asked me why I'm going to Paris for a month, and the one who have done so have not asked it in a positive way. It's obvious that there are many good reasons: a vacation, a change of scenery, a palate-cleaner. The art, the history, the atmosphere, the food. The question of why I am going to Paris is almost ridiculous.

But the question of why I am going to Paris is not. Perhaps it's partly because in my daily life I am exactly the sort of person you wouldn't think of as going to Paris. I'm a homebody, easily entertained by simple pleasures, tending to stinginess, risk-aversion, fearfulness. This is not so much the way I want to be as a rut it is easy to fall into and easier to stay in; I am usually plenty stimulated without going out of my comfort zone. I push myself to do things, go to things, take chances on events or activities I wouldn't normally do - but these things are exceptions. The rule is I go to work, come home, surf the web, watch TV, read a book, go to bed. I see the same friends in the same places, I go to the gym, I take in a ballet or a play. It is not a bad life, but it's nice to shake things up.

However, I don't need to cross oceans to do that. I live in New York City; there's plenty of shaking going on there. So I ask myself, what do I want to get out of this trip? I know that I want to see monuments and museums, take day trips, walk the streets and sit in cafes - but I also know that's not all I want to do. Just doing those things won't make this trip a success. But what will?

One answer to that is that I want to write, perhaps a lot, perhaps varied things, but I don't think that's the only answer. And I don't think I can know the answer. If I knew what I wanted to do in Paris other than see the sights of Paris, I could probably do it at home. I think what I want to do in Paris is figure out - or maybe remind myself of - what I want to do in Paris, of what I can do or who I can be outside my context.

Which is why I started this post talking about packing. For much of my adult life, I have been packing frequently. I've moved roughly every two years since the end of college, if not to a new town than to a different living situation (i.e. from having roommates to on my own) and now not only will I not be moving but I will be entering a phase in which I will not have to move for a potentially very long time. I am settling down, in a place and a manner I didn't anticipate.

And I am becoming someone else. Changing careers has hit me harder than I think it might otherwise have because my work has always been what has defined me. Everything else - my location, but also my friendships and other relationships, has been subservient to or even defined in terms of, what I do for a living. So doing something different suggests I am someone different, or that I'm not who I always thought I was. So I think part of the reason for taking this trip is to see who I really am now, and to remind myself of who I've always been.

The last time I took a trip of this magnitude was after college. Like now, I had something lined up for afterwards; like now, the trip was highly unstructured. I went with a friend, but after a couple weeks we parted ways, and all of my most compelling memories (although not all the most humorous ones) are from the time I was travelling alone. Alone in a series of foreign countries, with the daily difficulties and inspirations of travelling and a series of new landscapes to explore, the thing I felt most comfortable inhabiting was myself.

I think that's why I chose Paris. Partly, of course, to experience the beauty and excitement of the City of Lights. But partly to rediscover the beauty and excitement that have been leaking, over the last few years of defining myself by a pursuit that became increasingly unhappy and unsuccessful, to rebuild and rediscover the beauty and excitement of my life and myself.

2010-06-01T15:41:00.003-04:00

So when we last spoke, over a month ago, I had just completed - barely - a half-marathon. In the intervening weeks, a great deal has happened, so I will recap before trying to write the entry proper, or possibly at the same time.

Item: I ran another half-marathon. I was not particularly looking forward to it because of my bad experience in April, and because I really didn't train at all for it, but it actually went reasonably well. The weather was good, the course was way less hilly (although located in Brooklyn at 7 a.m. which violates at least three different laws of sanity (1: Brooklyn; 2: 7 am; 3: subway ride required to get to and from race)) and although I certainly did not run fast, there were no unplanned episodes of walking (I walked through water stations, both for a break and to ensure that I actually consumed water) and I finished in my goal of 2.5 hours. I did sustain an injury on the course, which necessitated stopping briefly around the 11-mile mark, but I seem to have recovered... today I ran for the first time since (the race was 10 days ago) and although I was not at peak speed everything seemed to be in order.

Item: I got a job. Searching for a job has been my primary occupation for the past month, and I have to say I was quite good at it. I launched a full-scale campaign of applications to companies of all sizes. I used word-of-mouth, articles in newspapers and magazines, and work histories of my linkedin contacts to assemble a list of companies to apply to. I joined job-searching websites both general and specialized and subscribed to every job-search newsletter and feed I could find. I attended networking events and had business cards made. I refined my resume and my cover letters and my interview wardrobe. I read books about the industries I was targeting, learned new programming languages, and studied lists of possible interview questions. I constructed an elaborate multi-tiered timetable for the hunt and considered the nature and timing of backup plans to avoid any significant period of idleness. I did all of this because (a) I had not ever gotten a proper job before, (b) the last person I know who left academia has been unemployed ever since; eight months and counting (plus the several months he spent looking for a job before that), (c) the economy is crap and like 10% of everybody is out of work, and mostly (d) this kind of paranoid hyperdrive is how I do everything.

And, so, it worked. Or else it was unnecessary. The two companies that ended up offering me jobs (more on that in a minute) were ones I had applied to early in the job-hunt process, and they had older versions of my resume. They didn't ask many of the types of questions I had prepared for and they didn't require most of the languages and knowledge and skills I had been studying. On the other hand, I'm sure it wasn't a strike against me that I could say that I'd been preparing for a career change by reading up on certain fields, or that I had thought a lot about interviewing and so forth. And I don't think doing this reading and learning - even the subjects that I won't use in the new job - was a waste of time, because I love learning new things and would like to learn all the subjects. It's just, I was digging in, preparing for a war that would last for several months, and now it is over after just a few skirmishes.

So, I said before that I was offered jobs by two companies. This is actually a story that I am proud of. I went on an interview at company 1; it was only my second in-person interview (although I had had several phone interviews at that point, including already two phone interviews with company 1). The interview was fine, everything was in order, but when I left the building I was depressed. Partly, perhaps, because interviews are stressful - but I think a lot of it was a feeling that the job was not as challenging or interesting as I'd have liked (a feeling I also had before I went on the interview). The people were pleasant but flat; the environment was pleasant but flat; the work seemed not unpleasant but also flat. When the job was offered to me, I also felt pleased but flat, but after a few days I had decided to take it. My reasoning was that, well, the economy is bad, and it is decent money for work I think I can do, and where is the guarantee that I will find something better?, and really I don't know what I want so how can I be sure that there is anything so much more appealing than this? Event after a discouraging conversation with a member of my prospective team, I was decided to the point of going out and buying some clothes to wear to the new job.

And then I had my interview with company 2. This interview was actually the reason I had put off accepting the first offer; I wanted to at least be aware of my options. But going into it, I wasn't all that enthusiastic. I knew someone who knew people who didn't like it there (I later discovered that I also know someone who knows people who love it, so that's a wash) and I had pretty much decided I couldn't do better than the first offer. But this changed the minute I walked into the office, which was such a beautiful and happy place that I instantly wanted to want the job. The people I met were also different from the people I met in the previous company - more animated, less stiff, more intelligent-seeming and engaged. They all seemed to really like their work, and I left the interview knowing that I wanted the job.

The next day, I turned down the offer at the first company. This is the part of the story that I am proud of. I hadn't gotten an offer from company 2 yet, so I wasn't turning down one offer for a (subjectively) better one. I was turning down the offer because for the past week I had been saying that I was accepting it because it seemed okay and I couldn't think of what would be better; now, all of a sudden, I could think of what would be better - being excited about where I was going to work. This seems outrageously obvious in hindsight, but at the time it was easy to tell myself not to set my sights too high. Once I interviewed at company 2, however, I realized that I should set my sights high. I did not do all this work, both the studying and the difficult emotional process of shedding my former life, to end up somewhere that I knew wasn't going to make me happy. I certainly didn't do it to accept the first offer I received just because it was the first. So I turned it down, in the hope that I would get an offer from company 2 and with the cautious faith that, regardless, I would find something I was really excited about.

It worked out well, because the next day company 2 sent me an offer. But I'm glad that I turned down the first offer before receiving it. I didn't realize, exactly, that I had the power to say no to something simply because I was holding out for something better that had not yet materialized, and now I do.

Item: I went to Philadelphia for a couple of days. It was not a terribly eventful trip; I walked a lot and saw lots of pretty buildings and a few tourist attractions. The most interesting thing that happened was meeting up with a friend from middle school whom I hadn't seen since perhaps early in high school. In the last few years we've communicated occasionally through email and Facebook, and at the last minute I sent her a message and we met for lunch, which turned into an all-afternoon affair, plus an invitation to breakfast and a morning spent together. At twelve we were the kind of very close friends girls of that age sometimes are, and it was pretty cool to see that - even though we'd fallen out of touch and knew little about each other's adult personalities and lives - we could talk easily and enjoy each other's company just as much as ever.

Item: I have decided to quit my job and move to Paris. Not really. But really. I have some time before the new job starts, and I have decided to spend three or four weeks in Paris, just being there. It's pretty last-minute for arranging a trip of this magnitude, so I'm still trying to get housing and other details ironed out, but hopefully I'll be able to arrange something acceptable. I realize it is (a) ridiculously inadvisable from a financial standpoint to quit my job and pay to live in two expensive cities for a month, and (b) a horrific cliche, the whole business of going to Paris to soak up its Parisness (oh, also? if you want more cliche? in addition to walking around and eating croissants, I plan to write.), but it is what I want to do.

The idea to do some travelling this summer was suggested to me and seemed good, but when I thought about it, I realized that visiting the places I haven't been but most want to go - Athens, Egypt, Russia, Alaska - is (a) not conducive to a single trip, and (b) something I can do in a series of shorter trips in the future, when I have more money and less time. The thing that I want to do that I can more easily do now - and will likely have a harder time doing in the future - is go somewhere to live for a few weeks, and the place that I immediately wanted to go to live was Paris. It is something I have thought of for a long time, with various degrees of seriousness. I have been to Paris once, at the end of my post-college hostelling trip, and I could not get into the city - but that was because I had not had a proper shower in five weeks, I think, not because of Paris. So - fingers crossed that I can actually get this organized - I am going to go back. And I do not care that it is a terrible cliche. Sure, everyone wants to run away to Paris for the summer. But not everyone gets to actually do it.

So, now we come to the point. For the better part of a year, I feel like I have been living in a montage. You know how in movies, there is often a montage about 2/3 of the way through? I'm not talking about the falling-in-love montage. I'm talking about the one after the character loses her job or her boyfriend or her way in the world, and we get to see the sun zipping across the sky, the seasons changing, the character staring at the ceiling and running on the treadmill and tapping on her laptop and slowly, in pieces so small she can't see them, assembling a new life for herself. For months now I've felt like I was in a montage period. I've known I was moving toward something and I've known it was an important thing, but I haven't been able to see it, I haven't even known for sure if I was moving in the right direction or how far I had to go. All I've had is the daily work of trying to make a little bit of progress. And now, the song is ending, camera is panning back in, and here I am, ready to start a whole new life, one that I - improbably enough - actually chose for myself.

2010-04-26T09:28:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I ran the MORE women's half-marathon in Central Park. This race had been in the works for a long time - I think I registered in January - and as it approached and various events (and injuries) kept me from training properly, I began to increasingly dread it. It turned out, I was right to dread it, because it was pretty awful.*

The problems started before the race began, with the fact that it was raining. Not a gentle happy spring rain; this was serious water. Also, I was lazy about getting up, which means I didn't really have sufficient time to go through my full stretching / breakfast routine and was probably not as mentally prepared as I could have been.

The race itself seemed reasonably organized, but there is just no avoiding, in a race of that size, that you are going to be tripping over people for most of the first mile. The problem is exacerbated by people in groups and walkers who somehow have started in front of you. I can never decide if something like this is good in a long race because it keeps you from starting out too fast, or bad because you use up a lot of energy running around people and you get frustrated right off the bat. (In a short race, it's unmitigatedly bad because if you're running for time, the thirty or sixty seconds you lose in the first mile might not be regainable later and average out to a noticeable per-mile time increase.)

The first three or four miles were uneventful, and I ran at a comfortable pace and walked through water stations, but then we hit a big hill. I hadn't been expecting this because all the other races I've run in the park have taken a different path that avoids this. It is definitely the biggest hill on the course. About halfway up I realized that many of the people around me were walking, and that I wasn't going much faster than them, so I decided it would be better to save my energy and walk too.

Coming down the west side of the park, I was starting to get tired, and it was just so wet. My hamstrings were sore. I thought briefly about bailing on the race - I would say I seriously considered it, but we all know that my legs would have to actually fall off of my body in order for me to stop running a race in the middle - but then the leader passed us - there weren't a lot of elite runners in that race, but there were a few - and we cheered and I felt a little better.

And then I started to make mistakes. I've noticed that I lose the ability to think clearly when I'm tired. I needed to use the bathroom - expected in a race of this length - and ended up waiting in line for the port-a-potties by the entrance, which had no toilet paper (which was especially bad because all the tissues I'd been carrying were soaked). If I'd been thinking clearly, I could have waited another mile, perhaps saved a couple minutes of waiting, and probably gotten toilet paper.

I also failed to take my second gu. I took the first one at the five-mile mark and had been planning to take the second one at nine miles, but I just... didn't. They had gatorade on the course but I was only drinking water, because gatorade is gross. Everyone has their own amount of gu that they need, but I think if I had taken the second gu the last few miles would have gone a lot better.

The third thing that happened, which was not my fault, was that my left hamstring seized up at 7 or 8 miles. I had to stop and stretch it, and it hurt the whole rest of the way. I also took off my glasses around this point, because they were so wet and foggy (and I no longer had even wet tissues to wipe them with) that my inability to see was less ridiculous without them. It was also just so wet. I seemed to be getting wetter and wetter, which of course at this point was not actually possible. There were rivers of water running down the sides of the road at every hill, huge standing puddles, the cups at the water stations were overflowing with rain.

At about 9 miles was where it started to go downhill for real. Before that, the race kind of sucked, in that it was raining and I wasn't making great time, but nothing awful had happened. I was still trotting along at an acceptable pace. But then we hit the big hill for the second time (the race was two loops around the park, plus a little bit) and I was just not happy at all. I walked parts of the hill, but the race marshalls were yelling at us to get a move on (which they had no business doing because we were nowhere near the back of the race - the course had a time limit of 4 hours, and there was a long tail of walkers) so I didn't want to walk too much, and of course I had less energy than I had the first time around.

And then it just got worse and worse. Every mile was longer and harder than the mile before. I started having to walk more often, not just at water stations but also on big hills. It seemed like everyone around me was doing so much better, although I kept being passed by the same people over and over again (i.e. I would pass them while they were walking, then they would pass me) and of course I couldn't see how tired they might have felt. Even at twelve miles, when I'd gone around the park twice and just had to run the bottom edge, with no big hills, and finish, I couldn't muster up any enthusiasm. In fact, at that point I very nearly broke down crying because I was so upset that the race had beaten me. For the last mile, I was switching back and forth between a very slow run and a very slow walk every one to three minutes (I was actually counting steps, running 200 or 300 or 400 and then walking 100).

I did manage to run the last tenth of a mile, basically out of shame, and I finished the race. Afterwards my legs basically gave out, and stumbled to the grass on the side of the road, where I plopped down in the mud. I had been sniffling and whinging to myself for the last couple of miles of the race - it hurt and I had to keep going - and now I started to cry in earnest. Which was actually a good thing because it flushed a lot of the mud and salt out of my eyes. I also realized at this point how much easier the race might have been if I hadn't run it solo... on the one hand, everyone has their own pace and their own needs for rest, and running with somebody interrupts your rhythm. On the other hand, it might have relieved the isolation and boredom (my ipod died at some point on the course, presumably a drowning death) and helped me keep my spirits up, which might have led to a better endrace. It also would have meant I'd have had someone to help me get up out of the mud. My journey home, not actually a long walk under normal circumstances, was a lengthy, frigid, wet odyssey, and then I spent about half an hour in the shower trying to soak up enough hot water to get warm.

So, not my best race. But I did survive it. I was sore and hobbly all day yesterday, but I feel substantially better today (although needless to say I will not be going running). My finish time was a full minute per mile slower than I had hoped to run, a good deal of which is probably attributable to the rain, both directly and indirectly, as well as to the mistakes I've described.

It's easy to remember only the last three or four ignominious miles, when I let the race defeat me. But I need to also remember that I haven't run any distance this long since the marathon (and associated training) in 2007. Sure, the first half of that marathon was a lot easier than this half-marathon - but I had trained with much longer distances up to 21 miles. And some of it is just that runs are widely variable. I ran a 9-mile race three weeks ago, and I didn't feel as tired during any of it as I felt at the nine-mile point of this race... but when I did the full marathon in 2007, I felt far worse at 20 miles than I felt at any point in my 21-mile training race.

From here I need to take a short break and then resume training, because there is another half marathon in four weeks. I am hoping this race constitutes some degree of training for that one, and if I get the chance I'm also going to try to fit in one more long (ten-ish miles?) run. I'm also going to make sure to actually take my gu properly, and I'm going to hope that this time it doesn't rain.

* You might be one of those people who thinks that any half-marathon would be awful. This is true, if you are not trained properly. I was not trained properly, which was most of the problem.

2010-04-17T22:38:00.000-04:00

Why I will not end up like the lady I saw in the subway station coming back from the ballet, who had a sign saying "I am homeless and have five cats and AIDS":

I am not homeless, yet.
I do not have five cats. I do not even have one cat. I have three dogs, but they are stuffed animals.
I do not have AIDS.
Arithmetic. I have a checking account, which contains enough money for me to live on for three or four months. Also I have other monies, although they are hard or strongly inadvisable to spend, on which I could live for at least two years. And credit cards; I could build up debt if I needed to.
Right now, at least, I have a job. I get paid once a month. I am almost certain to get paid at the end of this month. I am supposed to get paid for three months after that, assuming I don't leave or get fired. I think I will be fired when my boss finds a new researcher, but I think he is likely to give me a full month's notice.
I have parents. My parents have an indeterminate amount of money, certainly enough to buy groceries for me to eat, and a house with extra bedrooms. It would be unpleasant to have to live with them, but preferable to living in the subway.
I have friends. In New York and in other locations. Some would probably let me stay with them, or rent me a room in their house or apartment for far less than it costs to live in New York.
There is COBRA, right? So I would not get sick and die? It costs a lot of money, but it is better than getting sick and dying.
On a more practical level, I have a college degree. I have a couple of degrees, actually. Probably more degrees than the cat lady. Also skills of some sort, I think.
Yes. Skills. I can program a computer, kind of. I am not a bad writer. Technical things need to be written. I was a receptionist one summer, and I am okay at answering phones with lots of lines. I could be like Pam in The Office. We have similar hair, and I actually really like her wardrobe in the first couple seasons. Also, I know lots of useless things... I could be a tutor, or I could teach SAT prep classes. I think I know someone who used to do that.

There is not a real danger of me turning into the homeless cat lady. A lot of things would have to go very far wrong for that to happen (although I bet the homeless cat lady would have thought so too, before she was a homeless cat lady).

But there is a real danger of other things. Like of not having a job. I have never not had a job. I have never really had a job, either. But I've never had nothing. There is a danger of failing. I have lived my life in such a way as to minimize that danger, or at least minimize my perception of that danger. There is a danger of screwing up, of disappointing people, of getting rejected. There is a danger of being a failure. I am not supposed to be a failure. You do not think this because you know me from my blog, where I am a failure all the time, but actually there are a whole group of people who think I am smart and competent and successful, or at least there used to be. There is a danger that I will not be able to convince anyone else that this is the sort of person I can be. There is a danger that I am so unlikeable that nobody who interviews me will want to hire me. I could turn out to be too fat to work in the private sector - every single professional woman in this city is a solid two dress sizes smaller than me, which is actually quite a lot of dress sizes considering that I am not huge - or not know how to put on makeup properly (I cannot even curl my eyelashes without a major incident). My programming skills could not be good enough. Somebody asked me at an interview what is my favorite kind of math, and I don't know any math. I said differential equations, which used to be true, but I have forgotten them. Also topology. But this was years ago. What if I am just not as smart as I used to be? What if my mother is right and I'm not cut out for a real job? What if the private sector is for men and women who know how to deal with them? What if the problem is that I don't wear nail polish? Am I supposed to wear nail polish? How do people learn how to shake hands? Maybe my suits don't fit right, or I'm wearing the wrong tops and accessories with them. I do not know what a hash table is, and I think I am supposed to. I have business cards now, but who do I give them to? What is the reason any company should hire me? What on earth do I have to bring to the job? No company has ever hired me. Maybe I interview badly, or my cover letter is awful, or I am secretly giving off "don't hire me" vibes. Obviously I am. I have no more interviews lined up. What if I am doing something wrong, and I don't know what it is?

Oh.

2010-04-17T19:52:00.001-04:00

I know what that feeling is now, the one I've had in my throat and
stomach all week, that gets worse every day and makes it hard to walk
and breathe and sleep and eat (usually nothing makes it hard for me to
eat), that makes me pick fights with everyone and cry for no reason,
that makes me think I will die from misery if it gets any worse and
then it does get worse and somehow I do not die. The feeling is
uncertainty, and I do not like it.

Sent from my iPhone

What I've Been Up To

2010-04-12T19:59:00.003-04:00

Not blogging, obviously. Fortunately, I have many devoted readers (read: two, or possibly three) who all subscribe to my RSS feed and will be thrilled to see that I have something to say, except that at least two of them are the people I talk to most and therefore have heard it. But for the 0.5 average remaining readers, this will be a news-filled post.

I've been running a fair amount. Except I'm going to have to stop that for a little while, because now I have what seems to be "runners knee". The causes of this, according to my running book, include weak quadriceps [my quads have been sore for about a week, so this seems likely], overstriding [meaning, in my case, trying to take proper running steps rather than little old-lady shuffles so that, in race photos, you look like you have both feet on the ground at all times], and overtraining [so, um, running]. So basically, I've been getting cocky, doing speed work during medium-length runs instead of proper long runs (which is what I'm supposed to be doing to train for the half-marathon I'm running in less than two weeks), and yesterday - when I was already pretty ripped up - I decided that, with the good weather and so forth, it was the time to set a less-ridiculously-slow pace so that I'd hopefully be in a decent corral in future runs, and I did - yay! I beat my own personal race record, and as far as I know my personal training record for 4-mile runs (I've run a 5k at a faster pace during training), and I was very pleased - and now I can barely walk and have to go down stairs like the old lady I am apparently destined to move like. So I am making friends with my ice pack.
Traveling. I went out of town four times in the month of March. (1) Interview trip to North Carolina, which was quick and super-busy but not actively bad. (2) Conference trip to Portland, Oregon, which was weather-ridden but pleasantly social once I got there. (3) Passover trip to my parents' house. Predictably familial. Nobody killed anybody else. (4) Fun weekend in Boston, in order to decompress from trips (1)-(3).
Applying for jobs. Basically any jobs. This turns out (surprise, surprise) to be a bit of a challenge, since (a) we are still in the middle of a recession, at least as far as employment goes, (b) I am undertaking a significant career shift, which means that I have to find ways to make the last ten years sound like it was not a waste of time and/or irrelevant to anything a given company might pay anyone to do but was actually important and enriching training for my ultimate employment as a productive and valued professional, and (perhaps most importantly), (c) I have never seriously looked for a job before, or rather, I have never continued looking for a job long enough to find one, instead electing to continue my education or current employment, or taking positions that more or less happened upon me through my connections (none of which are of much use outside of my immediate field). So it is ... well, tough, and I have no idea how it will turn out, which is an attribute I generally avoid, which makes it tougher.
Watching a lot of The Office. It's on quite frequently, and if I'm home and not doing anything terribly engrossing (reading about jobs I am not qualified for is not terribly engrossing) I generally have it on as background noise. It's an excellent blend of optimism (since Jim and Pam eventually get together) and nihilism (since, well, everything else). And even their jobs would be a step up from my current gig.
Making coffee. My new coffeemaker is basically the best thing ever. I had a coffeemaker before, but my old roommate appropriated it. Now I have my very on, and it is silvery and pretty and I can make coffee every morning if I want, and if I run out I can make more. It is probably a tiny bit sad that a coffeemaker makes me so happy, but since I cannot wear my new running skirt as my knee hurts too much to run, there it is.

Probably the Sixth or Seventh Entry I have Begun in the Past Few Weeks, With Every Intention of Completing and Posting

2010-03-20T00:17:00.000-04:00

Somehow I have managed to get to the airport at exactly the wrong time: Even after unpacking, changing clothes, adjusting the contents of my carry-on and checked bag, and shopping in all the available stores, it is too early to check into my flight. However, it is also too late to shop at many of the stores, or to get ice cream, which I suddenly really want (it is also too late to get any other food except, I hope, snacks at a newsstand, which will presumably become a lot more annoying in a little while). Portland has been frustrating me like this. I already feel guilty about coming to the airport so early, even though I had a perfectly good reason, i.e. that by the time I got done at the conference and had something to eat it was too late in the day to go to any museums or other cultural sites, plus I was carrying my giant laptop bag and wearing uncomfortable (at least after 2/3 of a day of walking and standing) shoes (and, although I didn't know it at the time, the hem had come out of my nice pants... I'm hoping there is someone in New York who can be paid an exorbitant sum to fix the pants, because they are actually flattering and professional-looking, and there is no price that can be put on such a garment), and I had already walked around the easy-to-get-to places, and I was worried that if I didn't get my bag from the hotel within twelve hours of depositing it, they would confiscate it (this is what the claim tag threatened). So it made sense, rather than sitting in a coffee shop downtown, to come out here and sit around here, where there is also fre wifi, although at the moment no apparent outlets, although I am thinking there will be some by the gates.

Yes, I am crazy now. You would be too.

My big conference trip kicked off with a forty-eight hour delay due to Surprise We Are Apparently Having Monsoon Season. (You are several chapters behind, because this is coming on the heels of the big interview trip, which is coming on the heels of about four weeks of crazy, but I assure you it is nothing you haven't heard before. Pretend I am defending my thesis and training for a marathon all over again, only (a) each is about half as intense, (b) but, I am doing them at the same time. Extra bonus is now I live in New York, so there are different kinds of crazy all around me. It's pretty exciting.

So, forty-eight hour delay, which in theory could have been productive or fun or relaxing, and in actuality was a little bit of all of those but not enough of anything to make up for the fact that I missed my free day in Portland, getting unjetlagged, or the first day of the conference (as it turns out, though, Portland is only half as far away as Barcelona, and I had no trouble sleeping at any time, and my problem was much more in the vein of staying awake).

So I've been here since late Monday. That means I had almost four full days of conference, which turns out to be plenty, and three days' worth of lunches and dinners to spend with my friends and/or walking around the city. I like that it's such a manageable size, and also that the fact that I now live in a major city means I no longer feel compelled to visit every single museum I'm within five miles of, because there are museums at home. I actually feel like I got to walk around and get a general sense of the city's flavor and sights without missing ridiculous amounts of conference (I took two 2-3 hour breaks, one of which included lunch, and with walking around to get dinner I actually feel like I covered a lot).

The sense I get is that Portland is much cleaner and quieter than New York, and generally built in the style and scale of a smallish Midwestern city, i.e. Madison, rather than a smallish East Coat city. The streets are wide, there are public squares that take up whole blocks, in general there is just plenty of space. It's obvious they care a lot about greenness there. They have these tram-y things that run at about 20 mph in the city, like streetcars, and then run at about 50 mph in the suburbs (i.e. to the airport), like the DC Metro. Restaurants do not strike me as cheap relative to NYC, for what they are (i.e. decent ethnic food in a grungy neighborhood costs $10-$15... on the other hand the waitress may actually be pleasant to you). People are insanely, ridiculously friendly, everywhere; they are also in general young, attractive, and disheveled There are tons of panhandlers, but most of them look more like my scruffy filmmaker brother - i.e. they are on spring break from Boston College and ran out of cash - than like NYC panhandlers, who tend to look they way you expect people to would look after living on the streets for couple months. And speaking of the streets, they are clean, at least to the point of not being disgusting to look at; the people on the other hand, lacking New Yorkers' fastidious about germs and general avoidance of physical contact, are dirty. Also, they wear jeans and sweatshirts and fleeces and often no makeup, and in New York I am the only person I ever see who dresses like this when not at the gym. The architecture is attractive and varied, but perhaps a bit too varied to be optimally attractive - every building is well-planned, but they do not seem to have thought much about what buildings each building is next to. Also, there is sort of a general fake-Western feel about the place, like it has come out of a movie set. I expected people to be nature-y here, and maybe they are, but the dominant vibe I am getting is similar to the L train on a Friday evening - a lot of torn tights on women and nail polish on men, and apparently flannel shirts did not go out of style here.

In general, it makes me uncomfortable, because I feel like it is the sort of place I'm supposed to like, but I don't. I mean, yes, Powell's is what Heaven would be like if it were composed entirely of books, but it is one of exactly two good-sized bookstores in the downtown area. Everything moves slowly, which there is no excuse for in any area with public transportation. More, I cannot get a bead on it. It feels self-conscious, although I suppose I have thought this was true of everywhere I've lived since grad school. I can't reconcile the generally yuppie-ish feel of the city with the generally not-yuppie-ish feel of its inhabitants; on a purely economic level, looking at the people and the stores and so forth, I cannot figure out where they get the tax base to keep the streets clean and the trams (which are free downtown and reasonable elsewhere) running. Maybe there are different sorts of people, i.e. richer ones, in the suburbs? Wikipedia says Intel and other technology companies are the largest industry; it looks like they also do a lot of international shipping. It's also a regional tourist destination. They don't have any sales or restaurant tax, however, so this is still a mystery; perhaps they gouge their tech workers with local income tax.

Economics aside... I feel like Portland is a place that good crunchy people are supposed to like. It is a nice size, and friendly, and the kind of place where a person like means runs away during their quarter-life crisis to be nobley poor and write a novel about the evils of capitalism. But I think to me a city like this is just the wrong size - big enough to be annoying in the ways a city is, but not big enough to be exciting. I would rather be in New York and accept the stress of city life, or in a small college town and accept the lack of local excitement. (It is also true that I am looking at it as a visitor, which exacerbates both stress, since everything is unfamiliar, and lack of excitement, since one looks for things to do.) Perhaps more frighteningly, if I am having a quarter-life crisis I had better get on with it, and it looks like it will go in the opposite direction, i.e. I am more likely to discard my ratty jeans for business suits than the other way around, and I have already written enough novels to last me a while.

So, anyway, my talk was earlier today. I had not so much as looked at it since before coming to the meeting, until about forty-five minutes before which was perhaps unwise, but it went find, and afterwards several people told me it went well, including well-known people whom I don't really know, which is good, although (a) is what usually happens at such meetings, because I do good work and present it articulately, and (b) does not actually lead directly to me having a job, so ultimately makes me rather angry and bitter. I am always uncomfortable saying that I am good at giving talks, even though I am, because my parents, who are supposed to know me better than anybody, say I am bad at public speaking. It is true that I am often nervous about interacting with strangers, which in my opinion is perfectly rational, because strangers are by definition unpredictable. But talking about a subject I am highly familiar with in a controlled environment is not like, say, ordering lunch in a strange cafe. The latter has many scary and unknown elements; in the former, you just tell people what you want to tell them, and maybe they are interested.

(For similar reasons, I am good at navigating unfamiliar cities, at least compared to my friends, even though I supposedly have no sense of direction. It is true that I do not know by some sort of eighth sense which way North is, but I am capable of reading signs and matching them to the screen of my iPhone and remembering where I have been the previous day and how I got from there to the hotel.)

The wireless is starting to conk out, so I am going to go see if maybe I can check into my flight, and then I am going to demand that somebody sell me an overpriced bag of trail mix or something. At some point I will write a coherent entry, although that point is unlikely to arrive before Monday.

rules

2010-02-24T14:51:00.001-05:00

Yesterday a friend emailed me that he was impressed with my running. People like to tell me that, any time I mention my running (which is, I admit, pretty frequently), and it is always strange. I started writing a post yesterday morning about how strange it is, because my whole life I have been unathletic, and to have suddenly become (or, anyway, to suddenly realize I have become) a person whose athletic endeavours are interesting or impressive to anyone is odd. I was going to detail my various misadventures and speculate on whether it was me who changed or other people, or the type of people I know.

But I got distracted and also annoyed, because I realized that I was not as unathletic as I have always thought. True, my childhood involvement in sports was minimal and undistinguished - but the reasons for that were largely the mismatch between my parents' preferred sports-for-me (ballet, and later swimming, both of which I disliked in large part because I never had the right clothes for them) and my preferred sports-for-me (gymnastics, which was deemed too expensive, and soccer, which was deemed too masculine). In high school, sports were just as much about social categories as about athletics, and I joined colorguard. This is not a sport, exactly, but if you do not think it is athletic then clearly you have not spent much time running back and forth across a football field while throwing a flag in the air. And I never played sports in college - in general I am not big on poorly-organized, competitive, large-group social activities, which is pretty much the definition of intramural sports - but I did patronize the fitness center quite regularly.

So I was confused about whether I am an athletic person. I know I am not particularly fast or strong or coordinated, and I know that my whole life I have been told - by my parents, by my gym teachers (some of whom were almost comically unathletic, to the point of employing golf carts in order to traverse the track), and mostly by myself - that I am slow, weak, uncoordinated, and generally unfit. But I also know that, well, I like to run. And ellipt, spin, practice yoga, dance, lift, and hike. And that I do some or all of that stuff regularly, sometimes with a purpose and sometimes without, regardless of what else is going on in my life. And that a lot of people don't do that stuff, or only do it when they are trying to lose weight or fulfill a New Year's resolution, or do it much less than I do. And that, while I will never be impressively fast or strong, I am getting faster and stronger, and I feel good about my level of fitness. And I realized - this is like so much else. Most of what is getting in the way of becoming who I would think I was if I were just meeting myself isn't an obstacle of preference or ability; it's mostly the rules I've made, or let other people make for me, for about who I am and what I can do. Sometimes those rules have been convenient, but they are often arbitrary, outdated, and incorrect. They aren't immutable, and some of them - like the one my mother made for me once about not being able to run a marathon - are meant to be broken.

Training update

2010-02-22T20:32:00.000-05:00

This past weekend, I didn't do a long run, partly because I was recovering from several strains/sorenesses/injuries, and partly because the schedule said not to - it was a "step-back week", and the prescribed weekend run was a 5k race. Conveniently, there was a NYRR race scheduled on Saturday - a 4-mile run in Central Park to raise money for Haiti. I was anxious about it, because while I've run longer distances several times in the last couple of months, I haven't run outside at all, and I wasn't sure I'd be able to handle the cold, or the hills (not that Central Park is known for its mountain ranges, but even a gentle incline can derail a tired runner), or the peer pressure (there are some very very fast runners in NYRR, and I am a fairly slow runner, and I was worried there would be nobody as slow as me, and I would either be way behind everyone else or force myself to keep up and collapse in the middle of the race). The night before, I had anxiety dreams about being late and missing the race, which ensured I had no trouble waking up in time. Anyway, I needn't have worried; it was a good first race of the training season. The whole event was kind of a madhouse: they threw it together in eighteen days, and set the race cap higher than usual and then, apparently, removed it altogether. It wasn't very cold. There were plenty of people as slow as me; the other people who started with me all had paces on their bib that were similar to mine. I didn't run anything like my best time - I walked over both the start and finish lines (not because I was too tired to run but because there were too many people around me and they weren't moving fast enough), and finished in just over 44 minutes. I could certainly have finished a minute or two faster, perhaps even as fast as 40 minutes, if there hadn't been so many people - but in a way, it was nice. It was like a gentle Saturday jog with the whole city along. Because there were so many people, and because I wasn't exactly running with the front-runners, I got to listen to people's conversations (apparently slow people like me tend to run in groups). And since I'd been so worried about the race and so fearful I wouldn't be able to finish, I didn't mind not running my best time. It was nice.

So that was Saturday. Sunday I lifted. I don't really like to do cardio in the gym on weekends because it's very crowded and all the good machines are always taken. Today I did intervals. I've found a nice interval workout, where I start with 1 mile at a 1 0-minute pace and then run 2 intervals of 0.6 miles, 3 intervals of 0.4 miles, and 2 intervals of 0.3 miles (all separated by walking for a minute or two) at paces that accelerate to just about a 9-minute mile. (This doesn't sound very fast, and in fact I have run a mile in less than nine minutes in the last six months, but at the end of this workout it's really as fast as I can go.) I like this workout because it's four miles of running, and because it encompasses both longer and shorter intervals. My hope is that it will get easier over time and I will be able to make the intervals faster, although today (the second time I've done this workout) that didn't seem to be on its way to happening... still, I've definitely become faster since I started running again, and it doesn't seem like I've hurt myself today.

I did a little bit of lifting after the run; I can now do two sets of leg presses at 210 pounds, although I think the machine at my regular gym is unusually forgiving. This is a factor of about 2.5 greater than the next-highest weight I can do anything at (80 pounds, sometimes 85, on the lat pulldown).

Tomorrow, I'm going to spin. Spin classes are notorious for aggressive instructors, and this one is worse than many. I like the Wednesday morning class a lot better, but it's at 6:30 a.m. and I'm trying to shake off a cold that is trying to infect me. So I will just have to do my best not to get drawn into working harder than is good for me. Wednesday I will do a light run, or cross-train on the elliptical, depending on my energy and soreness level. Thursday is rest day. Friday is my long run - 7 miles this week. I've started doing my long runs on Friday in part because of the weekend crowds at the gym and in part because it means I can recover on the weekend (this is also part of why I did intervals today rather than Wednesday). Saturday is yoga, and Sunday is another 4-mile race, this one in Prospect Park. I also have races the next two weekends after that - 5k and 5 miles. Excitement!

However... it is now nearly two hours since I finished my run, and I'm starting to feel kind of crappy. I've noticed I've been feeling tired, not just in the legs but all over, and just kind of bad for several hours after strenuous runs. This is something I haven't experienced since training for the marathon. I know it is probably good and means I'm pushing myself, but it's not much fun.

oh, also

2010-02-19T00:18:00.001-05:00

Bad news: No sooner did I say I wasn't, than I am now getting sick.

Good news: I talked to a friend earlier who has run multiple half-marathons by running 3-4 miles a few times a week and one 7-8 mile long run on the weekends for a period of two months. She suggested I not stress too much about specific workouts or push myself so hard that I injure myself and/or cannot climb the stairs to my apartment without holding the handrail, and instead focus on consistency.

Now, since the laundry place is closed for the night, I am going to sleep.

2010-02-18T22:54:00.001-05:00

I witnessed an altercation today in the subway. It was a crowded express train at rush hour, and I was listening to music and trying not to let the motion of the train knock me over, because I wasn't in arm's reach of the poles and I can't reach the ceiling handhold. I gradually became aware of a hubbub in the center of the car, near the doors. I couldn't see any of what happened because of all the people in the car. A man was yelling, and he was yelling at another man, and threatening to punch him, and then I was pushed to my left as people around him backed away, and there was the sound of a punch, and more yelling. He was repeating himself, getting more and more angry, insulting the parentage of the man he had hit, threatening in a non-specific way to attack all the other Caucasians in the car. The empty space around him was getting larger and larger as the people on my side of the car moved as far away as they could. We still hadn't reached a station stop, and I was momentarily afraid that he had a weapon, that he was going crazy, that we were all in danger. I looked around and saw that most of the other passengers were African-American; a few were Hispanic or Asian. I felt very small and female and very pale. There was one other Caucasian woman in the car, that I could see, we made eye contact and she gave me a very small smile.

When we reached the next station, the man stopped yelling and must have gotten off the car, because a woman was yelling to stop him. I needed to get off too and switch to the local, but I didn't want to be on the platform with the scary, crazy, violent man. There seemed to be a scrum of shouting people moving along the platform and then up the stairs. The doors of the car were blocked by people watching and shouting, so I went to the other end and got out. There was still a fuss on the platform, and above me, on the mezzanine, a middle-aged man in a suit, carrying a large duffel, was running, and several police officers were running behind him. I couldn't make sense of that and thought maybe it wasn't related. I walked to the other end of the platform to wait for the local to arrive; there were fewer people there, and they seemed oblivious to the disturbance. Then, two or perhaps three minutes later, the man with the duffel was ten feet away from me, and there were two police officers, and there was a man in a red t-shirt standing under the stairs. He was young and skinny and unshaven and not very tall, and he wasn't wearing a coat. He didn't look any more violent or frightening than anyone else on that platform, but the man with the duffel was pointing at his face, where he had a black eye, and the police officers handcuffed the man in the red t-shirt.

I wasn't sure whether to feel afraid, because someone got hurt who shouldn't have, and it could have been worse and it could have been me, or safe, because a black eye isn't permanent and the perpetrator was apprehended, or sorry for the man who had so much anger and no winter coat, or sorry for the man with the duffel who got punched for no reason. Mostly I felt confused, because sometimes I am the person on the subway who is taking up too much space and and sometimes I am the person who is angry at them. And it is easy, in New York - a high-variance place, as Megan says - for a night to go terribly wrong, and end in getting punched (or worse) or arrested even if it started with a routine commute or going to meet some friends on the other side of town. It is also easy for a night to go terribly right, and it is easiest of all for a night to go in some direction you completely didn't expect, which is what seems to almost always happen since I've been here.

Item post

2010-02-16T00:32:00.001-05:00

Item: I remember a time when SuperBowl commercials were fun, or at least funny. And weren't all about beer, or the vast anger men seem to feel over the fact that enjoying the benefits of civilization may actually require them to be civilized. This is a response; I wish I could say "a hyperbolic response" or even "a funny response". But not.

Item: It is snowing! Kind of.

Item: I have a great deal of work to do. I don't seem to be doing it.

Item: Probably because my gentleman caller reads this blog, I did in fact receive custom software for Valentine's Day. It was pretty sweet - both the animated heart bouncing around in the little pop-up box, and the fact that he included the source code and explained a little bit about Java to me. (I also received roses and fancy chocolates and a card with puppies on the front and a romantic note inside, and was taken to a very nice brunch. This is exactly the sort of traditional Valentine's Day that suits me, and I am pleased that finally I have a gentleman caller to whom I do not have to explain how, actually, this fact combined with my lack of fear of math/science/thought does not result in some sort of unsolvable contradiction.)

Item: We are all going to think happy thoughts now, about tendons that heal overnight.

Item: A lot of people are sick. I am not sick; in fact I haven't been actually full-blown sick at all this winter. Possibly this is because there are so many pathogens in my body from the subway and general existence-in-the-city that they have killed each other off? I'm sure there is something lying in wait to get me sick at a crucial moment; I'm trying to preemptively take vitamins and get lots of sleep, because I know that once I do get sick it will last for weeks.

Item: This morning I met my next-door neighbor for the first time in the almost four months I've been living here. By "met" I mean that I know his first name and that he likes women who can wear stylish hats without looking stupid. I kind of like that I'm always meeting new people and never getting to know them too well; it allows me to sort of reinvent myself, or at least how I present myself, with very high frequency. And then I get to hear how I sound coming out of my own mouth and decide whether I like it. It's as if I can be anyone, even myself, if I knew who that was.

Item: My actual life, and also the limitations of my actual body, are starting to get in the way of my training. Tomorrow I will do sprints, and that will be fine, but I am a bit worried about when I will be fitting in long runs for much of the next six weeks, and whether I will be able to handle them. I guess I have to follow my own advice on that and stop borrowing trouble from the future.

Part of it, anyway

2010-02-13T19:53:00.001-05:00

It's hard. It's hard being a person. It's hard caring about other people. It's hard not being completely crazy, and it's really hard to tell where the line is. It's hard knowing who I am in relation to other people, and what I can ask them for, and what is enough, and what is upsetting. It's hard to know when to say enough is enough, and what that means.

It will get easier. Part of the reason I'm so constantly on edge, I think, is I haven't been owning my life. Ever, really, or at least for a long time. I had a therapist for a while, did I tell you that? Anyway, she spent a lot of time telling me that my mother was a bad person and that I was just like her, and that if I didn't do something about it I would become a bad person too. She didn't seem to have any advice on how to make my life better, or how to get what I wanted, or even how to figure out what I wanted, but she did want me to worry a lot less about whether I was making my mother happy and a lot more about whether I was making the men in my life happy. I stopped seeing her because I realized she was making me more mousey and passive-aggressive, and I was fighting more with my parents and less with men I dated but not getting any closer to what I wanted out of either set of relationships. I don't think I'm fixed, and my therapist made it clear I should not stop seeing her because I would just destroy my life, but I don't think having yet another view on what is wrong with me is much help.

I already know what is wrong with me, and it is not that I am a bad person. What is wrong is that I have spent far too little energy figuring out what I want and fighting for it, and consequently far too much energy getting upset at other people's attempts to do that. The reason I often feel sad and empty and become extremely upset over trivialities is that I never get what I want, and I never get what I want because I don't know what I want. Not knowing what I want means I drift. I do what other people - usually well-intentioned ones who care about me - tell me they think is best. They're usually not so terribly wrong that I'm forced to go against their advice, and doing what they tell me to do makes it easier for them to approve of me. It's nice to be approved of; I like it and so, I think, does everyone else. But being approved of - by your parents, or your peers, or your significant other - is not enough. It's not even the biggest thing, if you have other, bigger things. It's just a red herring, and continuing to strive for it keeps me from getting things I actually want, things that don't depend on other people changing their mind about what they want from me.

I've entertained the idea that maybe I just don't have a personality. The way my mother puts it is, maybe I will be unhappy no matter what I do. I suppose that is possible, but it is so unpleasant that it doesn't bear thinking about; anyway, it doesn't suggest a course of action, so there is no point in considering it. Just because I have desires doesn't mean I know exactly what they are, but that's okay. A lot of people don't seem to know what they want out of life. I think the important thing is to escape from the trap of always doing what other people think I should do. I am planning a big step in that direction, and that is a lot of what is stressing me out right now, because (a) it's a lot of work, and (b) it's fucking terrifying.

But I am going to do it. I am going to do it and then I will feel so much better, because I will wake up every morning in my own life. I hope that after a little bit of time of having my own life, and not someone else's life that they set up for me, I will lose the sense of anxiety that somewhere someone might not be approving of me, or might be thinking less of me than I am of them, or might have stopped caring about me. I will stop being so dependent on other people's opinions; I will stop analyzing everything people do and say to me, every time they say they will email or call and don't, every time they don't act the way I want them to act or give me the things I want them to give me, every time I think there is something they would do if they cared about me but didn't. It's not that those things won't bother me; I'm sure I will still care about people and they will still have the ability to hurt and upset me. But once I am living my own life and not a life that feels indentured, every little possible hurt will stop being such a life-or-death event.

My therapist used to say, in regards to anything anyone did that I didn't like, "it's not about you". This was a terribly upsetting thing for her to say, and totally unnecessary, because I am well aware that other people's lives are not about me. The problem is not that I think they are, or that I think they should be. The problem is that my life is about them. My life has always more or less revolved around the half-dozen people who were most important to me at a given time, so naturally the fact that their lives never seem to be nearly so dependent on me is upsetting. This is nobody's fault but my own, of course. And, when my life starts being my own, and when I start revolving around myself, I think I am going to feel so much better.

Valentine's Day post

2010-02-13T17:06:00.000-05:00

Item: I went with my book club to see the movie Valentine's Day yesterday evening. This is becoming something of a tradition, if you can call an annual event of two years' standing a tradition. Last year we saw a rather similar (many intertwining storylines) but more cynical movie; this year's selection was much better. Trite and cliche-ridden, but we expected that, and unstintingly good-hearted, cute, and positive. Movies are allowed to be mindless, if they make you happy.

After the movie we had a drink and talked about which character in the movie we each resemble (this is also a tradition of ours; it is the book-club-wide opinion that the fictional character in the chick-media universe I most resemble is Sex and the City's Miranda. Considering the characters who populate theses stories, I could do much worse. Anyway, the consensus is that I most resemble the Anne Hathaway character, which is not so bad because then I get to be a poet, and work for Queen Latifah, and date Topher Grace. I personally identify with another character who is so scattered that she sleeps among a pile of papers in her office and whose major sanity-maintenance efforts are comprised of running and eating chocolate, sometimes both at once. But I like their view better.

We also talked about our summer vacation; apparently we are going to try to take a weekend somewhere not too expensive with an ocean. Of course we can't all agree on what constitutes "not too expensive" or even "ocean," but I'm sure these problems will sort themselves out. I very much like my book club, and our habit of meeting every few weeks so that we're sort of background people in each other's lives. I don't think any of us would do as full-time friends for each other; we're all different and have different lives and habits. Instead, we're like extended family who see each other on holidays.

Item: I bought myself Vday presents. I was at the bookstore and Love Actually was on sale, and also a book of essays by Erica Jong.

Item: I just realized, I have grown to really like coffee. Not, "I have grown to crave caffeine" or "I enjoy highly sweetened beverages with an espresso base". I actually like coffee, black (unless it's from Starbucks, in which case I need to add milk to cover the burnedness), just because it tastes good. When I first started drinking coffee several years ago, people told me it was an acquired taste, but I never thought I'd acquire it. I drank it for the caffeine or the warmth or for something to do with my hands, and then it became a habit, and I stopped minding the taste, and then at some point - apparently - I started liking it. This has happened to a lot of people, not just me.

Item: I am trying to say something here, and I am not making any sense. That is entirely because I don't really know what I'm trying to say. That happens to me a lot. Words sometimes seem very cumbersome, like really a poor choice as a medium for expressing oneself, but I can't think what would be better. Colors? Words are the only thing I know how to wield with sufficient precision to articulate most thoughts, but I'm frequently clumsy with them, or my thoughts are frequently too clumsy to be worded. Writing a thought properly requires knowing its story well enough to rearrange it, because the way to tell the thought is not always the way you're having the thought. This is true for any kind of thought and, probably, any kind of expression. Sometimes, things are not ready to be said, and sometimes that lasts for days or weeks or even years. And then you have to just go and clean your apartment and hope things will be clearer later. At least, no matter how confused my head is, I have the solace of Swiffer.

2010-02-07T21:55:00.001-05:00

There comes a time, in an intense workout, when you aren't getting enough air. Sometimes it's two miles into a 5k, or twenty-four miles into a marathon. Sometimes it's twenty minutes into a spin class. Sometimes it's in the third mile of a 21-mile run, and sometimes it's before you even jog out of your apartment complex.

When you run short of air, there are a few things that can happen. One of them - the one that seems to come naturally to athletic people who don't train for endurance - is to speed up, try to get through the workout faster. This can succeed, if you're almost done - although I think not for me; just the other day I nearly keeled over in the final quarter-mile of a five-mile run when I decided to try to make the last little bit go by faster. It can work if you're at mile 2.8 of a 5k; maybe it can work at mile 25.5 of a marathon. But much sooner, at mile 1.2 of a 5k or at mile 20 of a marathon, it's going to be trouble. The air that didn't feel like enough at the slower pace is going to feel like even less at the fast pace, and whatever it was you sped up to try and avoid - slowing down too much, or walking, or cutting the run short - is probably going to happen, and probably it's going to be worse than you feared.

Another thing you can do is panic. This is what seems to come naturally to people who don't exercise at all. I hear so many people - young, normal-weight people who walk around New York in ridiculous heels all day - say they can't run even a mile because they run out of air, and it seems to me like unless they all have respiratory problems, they just don't know how to deal with being short of breath. This is not an easy thing to deal with, actually, and running is a pretty stringent test - it's simply harder than many other forms of exercise, and the difficulty is more sustained (in, say, a spin class - even a really really hard spin class - there are rests and breaks, and if you can't handle it you can back off without a qualitative change, whereas for many people (including me, when I haven't been running) maintaining a biomechanical run for more than a few minutes is a challenge, and then only way to make it not a challenge is to walk). It's very easy, when your body stops having enough air, to get worried, to think about the minutes and miles still ahead of you, to panic that you won't make it, and to let that panic become part of your pain and expand it, and then instead of just running right now you are also trying to run two and ten and twenty minutes from now, and it's too much, and you have to stop.

The third thing you can do - the best thing, and the only way a slow and not very athletic person like me gets through a long run - is to just, well, deal. You can't let your mind get away from you. You can't start borrowing trouble from further along in the run, worrying about how you'll make it through the next mile or the miles after that. You have to only think about the little bit of the run that you're in. I count things, sometimes - footfalls, up to the number of mile-hundredths or seconds I have left - or watch the distance shift up every 5 or 6 or 7 seconds. I listen to the music. I monitor the goings-on around me out of the corner of my eye or in the mirror.

I know my tendency is more to panic that I can't do something than to become overconfident and try to go too fast. I know I tend to get overwhelmed, and that my worry becomes a bigger thing even than what I'm worrying about. I've been beaten before, by my runs. On a sixteen-mile training run I sat down on the sidewalk about thirteen miles in and cried, because I had gone so far and it hurt so much and there was still so far to go and I had to go up another hill, a steep one, and even walking up that hill was painful. I had no idea how I'd make it to the end of the run, but I knew I had to, running or walking or somehow, because that was the only way to get home, and just knowing I had to - that I didn't have the option to hit the stop button and turn off the treadmill and give up - made me sick with fear. It was hot and my sweat had left salt trails on my legs and I was running out of water, and I sat on the deserted sidewalk and drank half of what I had left and put my head on my knees and cried. The crying didn't help, though, because I still had to get up - and getting up was hard - and walk up the hill and then jog and walk and jog and walk until I was home.

I was pleased with myself, getting through my five mile run the other day, not needing to walk at all and going faster than I was expecting. I was a little embarrassed about being pleased with myself, because I remember a phase in which running five miles seemed trivial, even insulting. But I also know there have been, and likely will be again, times when running three miles was something to be pleased about, and there are people - people I respect and like - for whom running half a mile is an accomplishment. It's weird to me, although perhaps it shouldn't be, how different hard things are independent of each other, how I can marvel at a woman who manages to look perfectly turned out - wearing pearls and making them look natural - on a Saturday afternoon, and she can marvel at me training for a half-marathon. It seems to me that, for a woman so incredibly together, someone with perfect stylish accessorized everything, running five or fifteen or a thousand miles should be a breeze. But I suppose this is not what she thought, and perhaps she looked at me and thought that a woman who can run a marathon really ought to be able to dress herself.

I have been doing hard things. One of my enduring concerns, in writing this blog and generally in trying to talk to everyone, is that my life seems trivial. This business of figuring out who you are - well, isn't that just fodder for the whining, self-indulgent rants of spoiled people? I know it is, and that virtually everyone I know thinks my life is trivially solvable (although they all seem to have identified different trivial solutions), but it still feels hard.

I have to pick a career soon, for instance, and it is practically all I think about. Running and icing my sore muscles and worrying about whether I have seriously injured the outside of my left calf is a fun break from thinking about what I am going to do for a career. And it sounds very silly because I am thirty years old and don't I already have a career? Except not really, and I have to pick one, and I have to make it pick me too, and I have no idea how. This entails not only pursuing jobs in two very different lines of work, preparing for two kinds of interviews, and reading two sets of literature, but also making a decision, which is so difficult for me that I have postponed the matter up to, and quite possibly beyond, the point of no return. The decision will affect where I live and who I spend time with, how I'm treated at work and how the world regards me, the level of freedom and supervision I have at work, what I'm expected to put into my job and what I can expect to get out. It will also affect what I do all day at work, although not, I think, as drastically. So it is a Big Life Decision, and probably an irreversible one, and the way I've coped with such decisions up until now is just not to make them, which is actually a series of really big (but sneaky) decisions in itself, and that's not working out as well as I'd like.

So life right now is kind of like a really hard run, with a lot of hills, and I don't know exactly how I'm going to get to the end of it (not of life, obviously, but of this bit of it). It could be that a series of miraculous events and lucky breaks will lead to an easy decision in two weeks; it could be - it almost certainly is - that a long and steep path is waiting, and that two or three or four months will pass before I know where I'm at. I could fail at this; I could make a decision that is not good for me and that I know is not good for me, just because I'm scared to find a path to something better or because the path is hard. There are obstacles; I have to read a lot of things and convince a lot of people that I'm smarter than I'm entirely certain I am, and then - no matter what I decide - I'm going to have to disappoint and upset people, and some of those people will be people I care about. At the end of the run, things will be better, or at least easer, but I can't rush all the way to the end - I'm simply not close enough; there's too much work still to do. I could panic, and that would be easy; I could say this run wasn't really what I wanted to do, that I only meant to run two miles after all, and stop the treadmill and call it a day. But I can't go try again tomorrow; if I stop this time, I've made the choice not to do the run. So I just have to deal. I can slow down when things get a little rough, I can list the tasks ahead of me and take them one at a time, I can map out which worries are for now and which worries are for the future. I can't escape those tasks, and I will have to do them all if I am going to get through this. But if I think about them all at once - if I think about all the books I need to read and all the people I need to talk to, the interviews and the interview questions and the interview suits, the different talks I need to give, the different ways I need to sell myself, all the people I have to impress and all the people I have to disappoint, all the expectations I'll have to create for myself and all the expectations I'll have to give up - if I think about all of that at once for too long, I won't be able to do it. So I just have to do it bit by bit and hope that when I get to the hard parts they won't be hard anymore.

plates

2010-02-05T23:41:00.000-05:00

I'm getting rid of my plates.

I've had the same dishes since I graduated from college. When I moved to the Midwest for grad school, my parents gave me a bunch of furniture and housewares they were no longer using. Chairs and a side table and patio furniture that became a kitchen set, and dishes. All of this was stuff I didn't have, and most of it was stuff that my roommate didn't have, except the dishes.

The dishes were the ones my parents had used as their milk plates (they keep a kosher-style home, which involves no actual kosherness but a full helping of kosher-related anxiety, arbitrary rules, annoyance at anyone who doesn't know the arbitrary rules, and guilt) until I was a teenager. They weren't fancy china, but they weren't inexpensive. They were also... well, not ugly, but they had a very distinctive cherry-blossom design, and they were sort of speckly and very heavy, and they really just reeked of the seventies, which made sense since that's when they were from.

So, I moved to the Midwest with about half a set of plates. My parents wouldn't let me take the whole set because they said I wouldn't need it; I got about half the dinner and salad plates and saucers but no bowls or mugs. That was fine, since my new roommate had a full set of plates, which were both less expensive and less ugly, and we mostly used those. When I got my own place I used my parents' plates, but since I felt guilty putting anything with meat on them I had to buy a couple of cheap, ugly plates at Target.

When I moved again, my parents gave me more plates. Their neighbor was replacing hers and they brought the whole set; there was eight of everything. They weren't my taste, but they were newer than my parents' plates - and that set, already fairly small, had been further diminished by two interstate and several local moves, several roommates, and various other misadventures. For a couple years I used and enjoyed the neighbor's plates, especially the part about having bowls and mugs that matched.

For my first year in New York, I had roommates, and the roommates already had a cupboard overflowing with plates. The kitchen was small, possibly even small for a New York kitchen, and there wasn't a lot of storage space in the apartment. I couldn't bring everything, and whatever plates I chose to bring wouldn't be used. The neighbor's plates didn't have sentimental value, so I gave them away and packed up my parents' plates. They sat unused for a year, and then they moved with me into my current apartment.

I still don't like them. They no longer have sentimental value, really, because all my memories of them are memories of using them on my own, not at my parents' house. My parents still have the mugs and occasionally use the matching soup bowls, but the bowls are a lot less ugly (no cherry blossoms). The plates are heavy, and several of them have been broken and glued together, and they make a horrid sound when they slide over each other. Worst of all, every time I use them I am reminded that these are the plates I have because my parents bestowed them on me. They are weighted with all my parents' expectations that I feel obliged to try, constantly and with no success, to fulfill. I didn't choose them, and my parents didn't select them for me. They were given to me because I needed something at the time, and every time I've suggested to my parents that I might get new ones at some point they've said I should wait until I have a home of my own.

I'm done waiting. I know that by "a home of my own" they mean a house with a mortgage, preferably also inhabited by a man they approve of and a couple of children for them to disapprove of my parenting of. I know that they don't approve of my life, or - as they call it - my lifestyle. I also know they probably don't mean their plates to be a constant reminder of the impermanence of my life, of how I'm making do with things other people have discarded, of how I'm waiting for something to happen to mark me as a person who is in charge of herself, but that is what they've become.

No more. I'm not in college. I have real furniture now, and the less-real furniture is at least stuff I picked myself. Plates are not expensive or scarce, and I don't have to buy a house or get married in order to deserve them.

Today I was at Bed, Bath and Beyond picking up toiletries (they're cheaper there than the drugstore) and I stopped by the dishware (what are plates called? silverware is flatware, right?) department. They have many plates, some beautiful and very expensive, but some quite simple and useful-looking. I bought four salad plates (which I use for almost everything) and two dinner plates (for cooling things, or if I make a big meal or something). They are white and circular with a broad rim. They cost $26.

They aren't beautiful china. They probably aren't the plates I'll have in twenty years, but they're simple and appealing. I like that they don't have to last. When one breaks, I can replace it easily.

You will think this is ridiculous. You will think it was silly and wasteful to buy new plates, of lower quality than the plates I already have. You will think I should be grateful for the plates my parents gave me. But I'm tired of being grateful for things I don't want. I am going to go right now and unpack them and put them away, and I am going to be done with the other plates from now on.

Hey, Blogland: Settle a Bet!

2010-02-04T23:23:00.001-05:00

Today's query: Is custom software romantic?*

I submit that it is. Or rather, I submit that custom software can be romantic, subject to its content. Moreover, I submit that custom software is more romantic than the equivalent non-custom item.

This seems obvious to me. Handmade is always more touching than purchased, all else being equal. A flowery store-bought card is romantic,** but not as romantic as identical sentiments composed by the bearer. Buying your boyfriend his favorite cookies is sweet; making his favorite cookies is sweeter. Giving someone a sweater from Macy's is nice; making them a sweater is nicer. That doesn't mean all gifts should be crafted by the giver; sentiment is only one of the purposes of a gift, and making something isn't the only way to be sentimental. Carefully selecting a store-bought gift is no less romantic, and often more so, than giving an unwanted or ineptly-manufactured item just because one has made it oneself.

Why should software be any different? Software is, if anything, more versatile in its romantic potential. One could write software for one's beloved with no purpose besides expressing one's feelings (for example, an animated graphic involving hearts, or etcetera); this is analogous to composing a poem. Or one could write useful software that would improve the recipient's life (and that presumably is not otherwise available); this is like knitting a blanket for someone who is always cold.

So I think custom software can certainly be romantic, and is potentially*** just as romantic as any other romantic gift.

* Disclaimer: None of this should be interpreted as sour grapes over the impending V-Day. If you have been here a while, you know that I always like V-Day.

** I don't buy the faux-purist bullshit that store-bought cards are inherently evil or stupid or devoid of meaning. The line of reasoning seems to be that anyone can buy a card, which is true, but not everyone does. The card was still chosen for what it says and its visual imagery, and for a lot of people it's much more accurate and poetic to let someone else verbalize their feelings. The argument against cards seems to be that people can choose a card that intentionally misrepresents their feelings, but of course people can lie in their own words as well.

*** I say potentially because level-of-romance depends on many specifics about the gift, including intangibles such as its intent, presentation, and nature of the relationship. Also, romance doesn't necessarily equate to usefulness or happiness; there is a certain very compelling breed of romance that is inherently doomed. Also mostly of all, I find it hard to compare levels of romance across time, situations, and people in any meaningful way. I have received jewelry in a romantic context, and I have received really unromantic jewelry. I have received romantic and unromantic flowers and romantic and unromantic chocolate. I have given books that I intended to be romantic, and flowers and chocolates that I intended not to be. One of the more romantic gifts I have been given or even heard of was a powerpoint presentation.

Maintenance

2010-02-02T22:31:00.001-05:00

People at the gym and the workouts they perform can be loosely divided into two categories: training and maintaining. Training activities are those designed specifically to increase performance; maintaining activities are designed to, well, maintain one's fitness level. People who go to the gym, jog on the elliptical for half an hour, do a few sets of resistance work, stretch, and go home are almost always maintaining. People who lift weights at length, work with a personal trainer, or design their cardio workouts (by adding intervals or seeking a certain target heart rate) are generally training.

I don't associate training with a particular intensity of exercise. The six months before I moved to New York, I was spending more time in the gym than ever before or since. I was there by six every weekday; three days a week I spent an hour on the elliptical before an hour-long sculpting class, and two days I went to an hour-long spin class followed by an hour-long yoga class. On Saturday I did two to three hours of running, step class, yoga, and sculpting, and Sunday was my rest day. I was working hard and in great shape. But I wasn't training. I was working out twelve hours a week because it made me happy and because the gym was where I knew people and felt comfortable. I liked being flexible and strong, but I wasn't going to the gym every morning with an intention to make myself faster and stronger; I was going to the gym because it was part of my day. I was maintaining, not training.

Now, I am training. I have a plan for my workouts for the next twelve weeks, culminating in the half-marathon I plan to run. I have articulated goals for distance and less-articulated goals for speed. Some of my workouts don't have specific goals, so in some ways they're like maintenance workouts - but they're part of a larger training program. Today's workout was a spin class; spin classes are generally conducted as if the instructor is trying to jar maintainers out of a rut and force them to train for 45 minutes.* Sometimes I like this, but as I get further into my training program, since spinning is my cross-training and is not supposed to exacerbate fatigue or any injuries, it may become a problem.

It's easy to think of training as the hard work that is done at the gym, but actually training is fun. When I see people training, I'm often jealous of them, or wish I knew them so we could discuss their regimens. But when I see people who are clear maintainers - people who come to the gym every weekday, or three times a week, and spend 30 or 45 minutes doing cardio at the same intensity every time, and then do their sets of leg lifts and crunches and biceps curls, and then stretch and refill their water bottles and go home - I admire them. They come to the gym even though exercise isn't their focus, even though something else is occupying their primary intention in life - their training focus is on their work, or on raising their children, or on going to exciting bars every night, or whatever - and they do what needs to be done to maintain, and they do it again and again, without getting discouraged, for months or years. It's that skill, the ability to persist in the absence of progress or even hope of progress, without any goal besides to continue taking care of things, that I admire, and I think it is the people who are able to do that, to maintain all areas of their life at all times, who are happiest and best off.

* It isn't relevant to this post, but I'm annoyed by the fact that female spin instructors often try to urge the class to higher levels of performance by invoking bathing suit season, which is always either coming or here. First of all, it's hard to think seriously about bathing suits when it's twenty degrees out. Second, the instructors especially like to do this on steep climbs, and most women who are trying to look good in a bathing suit are more focused on burning fat than building muscle, which is best done at a lower resistance level but for longer periods of time. Third and most importantly, I don't like the assumption that we are and/or should be exercising with a goal to look good in a bathing suit. Perhaps this is my own bias, i.e. no matter how many marathons and half-marathons I may run, and even if I am someday able to do a pullup, I doubt I will ever approach a bathing suit without anxiety, and if I do it will be a psychological and not a physical triumph. But really I think we can all agree that there are more important reasons to go to the gym than to conform to society's ideas of how we should look in a small piece of nylon.

Gear

2010-02-01T23:46:00.001-05:00

So i wrote an entire blog post. It is really long, and way more interesting (to me, anyway) and important (again, to me) than this one will be. But it is very personal, and it is largely about someone else, and I need to think more about how much of that post it is fair to publish. So instead, tonight's post will be a post about gear.

I have been on a gear-buying spree. This is partly because recent streamlining has left me feeling flush (at least until my health insurance company refused to pay a routine medical bill for no apparent reason and I now owe the doctor $310, which is entirely ridiculous and unfair and I am going to call them tomorrow, but it is entirely possible there is nothing I can do about it because the last time such a mistake was made by the human resources people, who get paid more than I do for the task of keeping everyone's insurance up to date and still cannot seem to do it, I ended up footing the bill because by the time the medical people sent me the bill the insurance company's statute of limitation had expired, which has likely happened here because the medical appointment in question took place in August) ... anyway, I was feeling a bit flush, and also I hadn't bought any gear in a fairly long time, and there is the half-marathon to prepare for.

The first thing I bought was clippy shoes, which I have already told you about. Then, I got new running shoes. My old shoes are starting to wear out; i can definitely feel at the end of a run that they're not really supporting me. It seems inadvisable to start a training program on bad shoes and with no backups, so I had my gentleman caller take me to Jackrabbit. This is a very fancy place where you are not allowed to shop for shoes on your own; you wait in line until a shoe-fitter is ready for you (all the shoe-fitters are about 22, very bored, and not as athletic- or wholesome-looking as you might expect running-store employees to be) and then he records your stride on a little video camera stationed behind a treadmill and shows you how fat your calves are from behind, and also how unhealthy your stride is. Then he brings you some expensive shoes and you try them on, and maybe he videos you again and tells you that the shoes have fixed your stride. But, I think it was worth it, because I did notice a difference in the before and after videos, and the problems the shoe-fitter said I might have because of my stride are problems I have actually had and now maybe I won't, and also I learned how to keep my stigmata from coming back (bigger shoes), and I have fancy, pretty blue shoe running sneakers.

Finally, I have gotten shirts to wear to the gym. This was a hard thing to actually buy, both because it has been difficult to find shirts that meet my specifications, and because I haven't been entirely convinced that I need them. After all, I have shirts that I wear to the gym. They are old and disgusting and have managed to both shrink and stretch, so that they are shapeless and unflattering and too-small in places, but they are not actually indecent. And shirts are not like shoes; getting better ones won't make me stronger or faster.

But it will make me happier. I don't work out in a vacuum, or alone in my apartment. I work out in a gym full of other people, and also flourescent lights and mirrors. Wearing clothes that are both ugly in themselves and unappealing on me does not enhance my workout. I can't think of a time I've been aware of worse performance or wimping out because of my clothes, but I'm sure the psychological effect of my yucky clothing doesn't help anything. Seeing myself in my ugly exercise clothes (my workout pants are also not the greatest things, even though they are fairly new, because it is hard enough to find pants that meet all my fit and function criteria without worrying about style, and since both my old pants managed to wear out at the same time I wasn't in a position to be choosy, but I will replace or supplement them when i find something really good, and they are black and not cropped - I do not wear cropped pants because of the aforementioned fat calves - so it isn't an emergency) on a daily basis cannot possibly be contributing to my fitness or happiness. When my new clothes come I will have more variety and can get rid of the most offending of my current exercise wardrobe, and it will be fun to have pink and green wicky shirts to wear on my long runs.

Next, if it turns out I am not owing anyone $310 and when I get around to it, I would kind of like a heart-rate monitor. The ones at the gym don't seem to work reliably; they tell me my heart rate is 70 when I'm working hard on the elliptical, and on the treadmill they don't work at all when you're at a running pace (by design). It seems like something I might use intermittently for a very long time.

State of the Capella

2010-01-29T16:48:00.002-05:00

Ever since Megan referred to this sort of post (negatively) in her blog, I've gotten a kick out of it. The way I see it, it's my blog. If you are bored of it, stop reading. (Or, at least, stop reading this entry, and come back for my various rants.) Anyway, I don't see why these entries are necessarily boring... some of my favorite blogs are nothing more than commentary on what people have cooked recently or what their children are up to, and I neither cook nor have children.

I am training for a half-marathon. Or, rather, I am sort of on the cusp between preparing to train and actually training; the race is in three months. I've never done a half-marathon before, although I did a marathon a couple years ago. I have the (perhaps erroneous) belief that this will be much easier, and also that it will not require me to devote myself to it the way the marathon kind of did. I have a couple of pretty major things I want to do in the next three months that have nothing to do with athletics, and I also don't want my workouts to become entirely focused on the marathon. I want to continue my weekly spin classes, especially now that I've just gotten the appropriate shoes, and I want to continue doing yoga once a week (yes, this is grossly inadequate, but it's hard to find good classes that are also convenient... in general, when you are only spending six hours a week working out instead of twelve it is really hard to do everything adequately), and I don't want to totally fall off the wagon on strength training, and I've been running intervals one day a week lately and I want to keep doing that. So I'm hoping I can train for the half-marathon via one gradually-lengthening long run per week, plus session a week of intervals, one session of spin, one yoga class, a solid lifting session plus a couple of mini-sessions (i.e. two or three machines before or after a cardio workout), and whatever combination of additional cardio workouts (elliptical, or some hill training if I can manage it) and rest seem appropriate on a week-by-week basis. On the one hand, there is a danger of not taking the race seriously enough; on the other hand, my goal is not so much to run a really good half as to get in really good shape, such that running a decent half-marathon is doable even without the sort of massive psychological effort that underlies most beginner marathons. First thing I'll need to do is get new running shoes, and also possibly some cute wicky tops.

Last night, I saw Sleeping Beauty at the ballet. It was quite impressive. I am starting to notice certain themes to these performances. There is a lot of playing around with the nature of reality: dreams and visions, dolls that come to life, people that become dolls or animals. Frequently most or all of the plot of the ballet takes place in the first act, and the second act is a sort of marquee in which a series of characters - fairies are popular, as are various fairy-tale and nursery-rhyme characters - perform for the benefit of a king and queen (there are many kings and queens, and many marriages of princes and princesses. I really like my seat this season, and I could see keeping it for the spring season. It would be kind of cool to be the kind of person who sits in the same place at the ballet every season, year after year. Kind of like having a life.

2010-01-23T19:19:00.001-05:00

I found myself having a heated discussion the other day about whether money can buy happiness. I've had this conversation before, and I always seem to be on the opposite side of whomever I'm talking to. I'm not sure if this is because I'm exceptionally argumentative, or I know a really diverse array of people, or what.

The particular form of the latest argument was whether, given one has a crappy job, being paid more money can make one less unhappy about it. To me this sounds trivial, and the answer is "yes". I mean, yes, there are jobs so dehumanizing and awful that one will be miserable no matter how much one is paid - but that isn't most crappy jobs. Most crappy jobs - particularly of the variety held by people I actually know - are just boring and inconvenient and stupid. And, yes, that sucks, and maybe most people would be happier with a job they liked that paid less than with a job they disliked that paid more, but that's not the question. The question is whether having money makes life with the crappy job more palatable.

The woman I was arguing with, who is my friend and a very nice person, claimed that this was not true, because she has a crappy job and works incredibly long days, and is miserable, and when she comes home she has absolutely no desire to spend money so having more of it would not help her. But she said this while sitting on her leather sofa with her designer puppy in her 800-square-foot apartment with its own washer and dryer and real art and a walk-in closet. I am pretty sure - although I could not seem to communicate this to her nicely - that she would be less happy if she came home to a tiny, dingy place at the far end of a subway line in the boroughs and had to share her bedroom with two other girls and couldn't afford to get takeout every night. And she seems pretty sure of this too, because do you know what she is going to do about her unhappiness? She's asking for a forty percent raise.

2010-01-20T01:26:00.001-05:00

The whole debate over plus-sized models is ridiculous. I will not bore you or keep myself up even later by finding tons of links, but basically (if you're a man or have been under a rock) it started a few months ago with Glamour publishing the photo on this page - a tasteful nude shot of a woman with curves, including on her belly. Glamour is actually, among magazines for young women, fairly good about publishing photos of "real women", i.e. modeling which cuts of a particular type of garment flatter various body types. Still, the photo received a ton of attention, both positive (women saying the shot made them feel so much better about themselves, or something) and negative (she is fat and disgusting and the embodiment of all that is wrong with America, etc.), and enflamed an ongoing debate about the body size of models. Which basically runs, well, most models are super-skinny, which is because (a) most clothes are made to look best on super-skinny models, and (b) they (usually) starve themselves. Plus-sized models are actually normal women, although much taller and more attractive, which (depending on your point of view) means (a) they are a breath of fresh air and some kind of feminist statement (i.e. that we have a right to have body fat, which apparently still needs to be stated), and (b) society is degenerating because we are all getting fatter, and having larger models is just giving up.

Now, I'm not totally on board with the "obesity epidemic" panic, but I'm prepared to believe that lots of people could stand to lose some or even a lot of weight. However, the ideal way to lose weight is to eat reasonable quantities of healthy foods and exercise moderately, not to hate your excess body fat until the sheer force of antagonism makes it disappear. Moreover, models are not spiritual guides or moral exercises. Their purpose is to look good while wearing or doing things that their employers want us to wear or do. When models are in ads for perfume or face cream, their looking like regular people might be a good thing (we can perhaps better imagine ourselves wearing that perfume or face cream) or a bad thing (they are no longer as incredibly glamorous and therefore we are less convinced that buying the product will make us incredibly glamorous), although I think this is probably a small effect. But when models are in ads for clothes (or articles about fashion or catalogs or web sites designed to sell clothes) there is an immediate effect: skinny models make the clothes look the way they would look on a skinny person. If you are not a skinny person, the clothes will not look that way on you. Some clothes look better on women with more shape (menswear-style shirts) and some clothes look worse (any dress without a waist). Given that one of the purposes of fashion magazines is to advise women on their clothing purchases, and the sole purpose of a clothing retailer's catalog or website is to induce those purchases, I think it would be a really good thing if models had a range of body types.

Because, except at the highest reaches of fashion, where clothing is art, a garment that only looks good on 1% of the population is not a very good garment, at least for 99% of everybody. Using only skinny models encourages designers to make clothes that look good on skinny people, and makes it harder for women to get the information that the clothes won't look good on them and therefore harder for us to demand that retailers sell clothes that suit different types of frame.

Because - hard as it may be to glean this from all the debate about the aesthetic awfulness of models who look a little bit like human beings - the purpose of clothes is to fit our bodies. That is what they are designed for. It is not the purpose of our bodies to fit into clothes. It is the purpose of our bodies to run and breathe and eat and have sex. Not to fit into clothes that have been designed for totally different bodies, which in many cases are not healthy bodies, or clothes that have been designed with no reference to bodies at all.

That is why I am getting rid of my Banana Republic skirt. I have had it three years and have worn it, I think, twice. I bought it while shopping with my grandmother, who liked the store and wanted to get me something in it. I don't particularly like or dislike it; I chose it because I didn't like most of what the store contained and it was on sale. (It was still more expensive than almost any other garment I owned at the time.) The reason I don't wear it is partly because I don't wear many skirt and partly because it does not fit. Pathologically. It is both too tight and too loose, and appears to have been designed for some other type of being entirely, like a skirt-wearing man. I do not think any woman of my size could have the proportions required to fit into this skirt. It is a skinny-woman's skirt blown up for a normal-sized woman. Did they have any normal-sized women try it on before they started selling it?

So it is not a good skirt for me, and I should not have bought it. I kept it not because I was seriously planning a regime that would result in the skirt fitting better, but because it seemed like I should fit the skirt. If everything in my life were properly aligned, I thought, I would always go to bed on time and never want ice cream and magically my body would conform to the mold of a skirt that doesn't even resemble a shape I would like to be. It wasn't that I wanted my body to have the particular shape of the skirt; it was that I wanted my body to be something that the skirt would fit.

And then I wore it for the second time, and I was uncomfortable the whole evening. The skirt kept twisting and riding up and the extra fabric was bulging under my shirt. Fortunately, I was sitting in one place most of the night, but sitting there in a miserable skirt that cost too much money and never fit me and that I don't even like all that much, I realized the whole thing was ridiculous. It is a skirt. It is not a person. It is not a totem of some earlier, legendary, thinner time. It is a small piece of fabric that is utterly useless to me because it fails to conform to the shape of my body. The problem is not me; the problem is the skirt.

This is obvious to everyone with two brain cells. And yet all over the (Western?) world there are women whose closets contain garments that do not fit them, that do not look good on them, that do not make them happy. We keep these garments not because we can't replace them but because we believe, somehow, that it is our bodies' job to fit into them. And this is silly. We do not buy glasses that are the wrong prescription for our eyes and insist that we should be able to see with them. We do not buy books in languages we don't speak and then feel bad that we can't read them. And yet, somehow, when we have a pair of pants that clearly has the wrong amount of fabric for our frame, or a skirt that ends at a weird spot on our legs, we insist that it is our bodies - even if they are healthy and happy, even if we are satisfied with them outside the context of the garment - that are flawed and not the silly, arbitrary, fueled-by-consumerism-and-outsourcing-and-fashion-industry-peculiarities piece of fabric that should be designed to celebrate them.

Okay. I am done ranting for the day.

New York state of mind

2010-01-19T17:08:00.002-05:00

To me, the interesting thing Penelope had to say in this post was not about racism or religion but about culture and how we define ourselves relative to it.

One of the things I've spent a lot of time thinking (and worrying) about is where I belong. Where I belong professionally, geographically, even socially. I spent a decade in academia, not primarily because I loved my work or even because I didn't know how to leave, but because I felt I belonged there. It is hard to leave somewhere you feel you belong, even knowing you are likely to be happier somewhere else.

More and more, I have no idea where I belong. I used to belong in the East Coast suburbs where I grew up, and when I left them to go to college and grad school I experienced a culture shock. I spent most of my time in the Midwest feeling like a fish out of water, whether I was at school or at home; at home or at my parents' house. Nothing in my new environment was what I was used to; it was foreign and at first a little bit wrong-seeming, or at least wrong for me. But after a few years I grew to appreciate it, and then my childhood home became the place that seemed wrong for me. Perhaps more jarring than growing to love the Midwest was realizing it was possible for me to do so; I had unconsciously internalized all kinds of stereotypes without realizing they were neither accurate nor complete, and it was difficult to come to the realization that my life as I experienced it was in direct opposition to what I thought I knew.

Now, in New York, I miss these places. I miss small college towns. I miss open space. I miss the people, too; one thing about people in New York is that, while there are certainly all kinds and while many of them are from somewhere else, they all chose to come here. People in other places mostly have never lived in New York and never wanted to, which is a very appealing trait.

My parents don't like New York. Or, actually, they do like it, as a place to visit. But not as a place to live. They talk a lot about my "New York Lifestyle," which in their minds seems to resemble a montage of Sex and the City clips. Needless to say this bears little to no resemblance to my actual lifestyle, which contains less alcohol and more sensible shoes. But it probably is the lifestyle most people associate with New York, and while I know - both from doing it and from seeing other people do it, sometimes much better - that it is possible to have a different sort of life in New York, I sometimes wonder whether it is worth being here if you are going to have a different sort of life.

I don't think I will ever really belong here. This is not in itself an impediment; as far as I can tell, the city is mostly populated by people who don't feel they belong here. It's a giant, scary place, and living here is like riding a dragon might be; it's a wild ride, if you can handle it, and there's nothing quite like it, but the dragon is not ever going to become your pet. The fact that you can't own the city is the better part of its appeal, but not everyone is cut out to spend their lives in a place that will bit your arm off as soon as look at you.

But it gets under your skin. I was talking about this the other day with a friend who has been here four years and who, while not exactly loving it, doesn't think she could ever leave. The way she put it was that New York has spoiled her for everywhere else, but I don't think that's accurate. Softness and ease spoils you; wild rides are addictive. I think leaving New York is probably something you either have to have done to you or something that takes all your energy - like leaving academia, which I've spent half a decade working on with, so far, little success. I think it's scary because you say things to yourself like "where will I get a decent bagel?' and "how can I live without regular access to world-famous visual and performing arts?" and "the energy of the city makes me feel alive!". You remind yourself of all the great things New York has and let the bad things - the stink of the air, the constant crowding, the rudeness, the trash on the streets, the inability to buy basic necessities at reasonable prices, scary people on the subway, the fact that every time you try to go anywhere you have to navigate a dozen unpleasant situations per block - become routine and ritual annoyances. And so you stay.

I don't think that will be me. A lot of people here grew up in suburbs and have been here since college. They don't know anything else. To them, living outside New York is the same as living with their parents, or worse, being their parents. It is being stifled and bored, having no life outside of ferrying your children to soccer practice, not participating in anything larger than a teenager's vision of their parents' life as mindless wastelands.

I've lived other places. Not for long, perhaps, but long enough. I know what it's like to have a commute that doesn't involve watching rats scurry around in tunnels. I know what it's like to go to a real Target or grocery store or shopping mall and buy the things you need without worrying about where, if you don't open that box of tissues for three days, you can possibly store it. I know what it's like to look out your window and see trees and animals instead of, or in addition to, concrete and brick. I know what it's like to live somewhere you know well, where people and things become familiar over time, where you can find a small part of the world to gradually grow to belong to, and how good it feels to belong somewhere. Other people think, in their heads, that life outside New York might possibly be easier - they might have more space, more time, more money - but I remember that it actually is easier. That it's rewarding, too, to drive on roads that looked like something off a maple syrup package and to shovel snow, and have allergies to pollen rather than dust. It's rewarding to have friends rather than drinking buddies and to have them not really care who makes more money or wears smaller clothes. It's rewarding to know where to get the best soup and coffee, and who I will see there, and not having to worry if there will be open seats. Having space and time and money to spare is freeing and delightful.

I don't want to idolize it; I remember the bad stuff, too, the stuff that people in New York fear: driving for hours to get to a major airport or museum, aggressive advertisements for churches, waiting longer for things to come in the mail. But in New York, the bad things are background and the good things are occasional (perhaps frequent, but still occasional in the sense of discrete and occurring on distinct occasions); elsewhere, outside the city and beyond the suburbs, the good things are background and the bad things are occasional. The good things, the reasons for living there, are the things you have every day, rather than things you have to work to include in your life. It's thrilling to live among so much excellence and excitement, but it would be more pleasant to live somewhere clean and quiet and nice.

I won't be ready to leave for a while. New York is good for me right now. It's an amazing experience, living here. I'm learning so much. I'm also figuring out what I want to do in my life, and while you can figure that out anywhere, you can't necessarily act on it anywhere; in New York, you can act on almost anything. But when it's time to leave, I hope I will be able to free myself by remembering the daily, easy joy of living somewhere less intoxicating.

ill-considered thoughts on publishing

2010-01-12T14:27:00.000-05:00

I've been following the Game Change saga with some interest. Not the actual book - I have no particular intention of reading it - but the issues surrounding its publication. The book itself is a sensationalized account of the Bush-Gore election. It was initially scheduled for a moderately-large print run but received a lot of publicity in the week before it was released. Now, thanks to the reviews of pundits and ensuing controversy, the books are selling out, and the publishers are ordering more. But since (1) it takes time for books to be printed, and (2) much of the demand is attributable to the publicity, it is entirely possible that many of the books being printed now will not be bought. Buyers will not necessarily wait a month to buy this book, since in a month something else will be abuzz and they will want to buy that. So the publishers will possibly lose out on sales and have extra books.

The reason there is so much controversy about this issue is that there is no electronic version of the book. That's pretty unusual for new books of this magnitude. Electronic versions aren't universally accessible, of course, but they have obvious distribution benefits (instantaneous shipping and ~zero marginal production cost). In a publisher's perfect world, everyone would want the physical book (in hardback) but be willing to buy the electronic book if it weren't available; that way a publisher could order a conservative print run but still capture all the excess demand and part of the excess profit. In the real world, people are increasingly unwilling to pay $25 and up (hardcover price) for something to read.

I think it's true that electronic distribution, if and when it percolates fully, will reduce profits on certain kinds of books. More frightening for the literati, it will destroy the mid-list. In the current system, mid-list authors (those who don't have a famous name or the full backing of their publisher's publicity machine) are chosen for quality and marketability. Those authors need publishers to edit their books and turn them into physical products, and we as readers need publishers to find good books and make them better. Formatting an electronic book for publication is easier, and as e-readers percolate, marketplaces for e-books will become more open. It will be harder for the casual reader to distinguish between a "professional" book (i.e. one that has been selected by an editor, that has gone through an editorial process, and that has been packaged for readers) and an amateur book (which could be just as good - or could be the accumulated rantings of a lunatic), and so the prices of the two products will converge. There will be some gains, as writers are able to reach their audiences without going through the filter of a publisher. But there will be (many more, I think) losses, as the market is flooded with low-quality product and readers begin to rely increasingly on the few books that have been selected for heavy promotion (i.e. the ones you see on the tables in the front of the bookstore), which may not be the best books but at least have a certain guaranteed level of professionalism.

This will all even out over time. Readers will become willing to pay a premium for a book with a known publisher's imprint, and publishers and editors will regain some of their power and profit margins. Self-publishing authors will need to improve or promote their product for it to be successful. There will be more fluidity in the whole process, and eventually everything will be better.

But one thing that will be lost is inefficiency. The tens of thousands of remainder books that are returned to publishers and pulped every year - there won't be nearly as many. Physical books will be printed only for blockbusters, or mass-market evergreens (romance novels, etc.) for which demand is predictable, or on demand. This will be good for profit margins, and it will reduce the potential loss of publishing a book (allowing quality to be a stronger determinant of publishability relative to marketability). What it will be bad for, and what I will miss, is the supply of $5 books - quality novels and former bestsellers and last year's social science fads - stocking the discount shelves at Barnes and Noble. It is also possible, although I think unlikely, that I will also miss Barnes and Noble itself.

Grocery shopping

2010-01-11T17:23:00.001-05:00

Before I moved to New York, grocery shopping was fun. I would drive in my car to the grocery store, where I would park in the parking lot. I would get a cart and go into the store. Unless I was shopping on a weekend afternoon, it wouldn't be very crowded. I'd start in the produce section, where I'd buy the same favorites every time - apples, bell peppers, mushrooms, sweet potatoes - and a few other items that looked good and were in season (peaches, berries, watermelon) or that seemed like good potential additions to my diet or very narrow cooking repertoire (onions, broccoli). I'd proceed to the meat and cheese section, then along the back wall for milk and eggs and yogurt and cheese (my cart was always heavy on dairy), then through the aisles for cereal, canned soup and beans, whatever staples - rice, bread, peanut butter - I was out of. I'd stop in the organic aisle for luna bars and frozen waffles, and often I'd buy a carton of ice cream. Then I'd check out and go home. The trip would take an hour, including driving time, but I wouldn't need to go back for at least a week.

Now, I go to the grocery store every two or three days. There is no such thing as a bad time to go to this store; there are only awful times and unbearable times. I go to one of the (very) few full-service grocery stores in my neighborhood (I also sometimes buy food at Duane Reade, because it's not much more expensive and usually more convenient, but the selection is highly limited... my parents, who have never lived in New York, tell me I should do my grocery shopping at corner stores, which is probably because they have seen neither the prices nor the selection at these locations). It is always crowded, unless it is a time that is convenient to shop, and then it is extremely crowded. Customers squeeze past each other in the aisles, and you have to grab what you want to buy as you walk, because if you try to stop the tide will push you along. Intersections generate vortices of people and carts or else total gridlock. People who are ordinarily polite and deferential use their baskets and carts as defensive weapons; people who are ordinarily assertive use them as offensive weapons. The staff in charge of restocking shelves barrels through the mash of customers pushing tall carts, ignoring the elderly women whose carts they sideswipe and anyone who might be trapped in their path.

At the registers, it's all efficiency. Somebody tells you which register to go to, somebody checks and bags your groceries, somebody else whisks away your basket as you empty it, you swipe your card, and you're done. Today I was at register 8 buying my essentials for the next 24 hours and the woman at register 9 had lost her wallet. She was only just realizing it when I got there: she rifled through her bag, checked her pockets, looked on the counter under the bag as if maybe she'd already taken it out. How can this be, she asked the woman working the register. I don't have my wallet. I felt bad for her, less because of her lost wallet - probably she'd just left it at home or at work or in her other bag - than because of her confusion. Where could it have gone, she asked. She wasn't talking to me, of course - nobody in New York is ever looking at me or talking to me, unless I am the specific person they are trying to interact with, which I'm still not quite used to - but I made a show of looking around on the conveyor belt and floor in my vicinity, in case she'd dropped it without noticing or in case she wanted help. The woman working my register gave me my receipt to sign and my bag of groceries. The customer at the register next to me gave up looking through her bag. Oh, this is so annoying, she said. The woman working her register shrugged, dropped the already-bagged groceries in a bin behind her of items to be returned to the shelves, and waved her hand in the air. Next on 8! Next on 9!

flow

2010-01-08T23:18:00.002-05:00

This Morning

When I am starting, I tell myself that I only have to run for thirty-five minutes, and I don't have to run fast. Thirty-five minutes is twenty-one hundred seconds. I count seconds when I run, and footfalls and hundredths of miles, and divide them by various numbers and count them again, to give my mind something to do. To distract myself from how out of shape I am; from how even going to the gym four times a week I have gotten so out of shape that running for thirty-five minutes is hard. But I am kidding myself, because even when I was in shape to run a marathon, running for thirty-five minutes was a little bit hard; the training just meant that it stayed only a little bit hard for two or three hours.

I try to find a place of zen. When I would run outside, I'd find it in songs I liked or hills I was used to. Right now it's too cold outside, and New York is dark half the time and crowded the other half, so I'm on a treadmill at the gym. I don't have a choice of music. I find pieces of zen in the shifting patterns of numbers on the clock and the pedometer and the calorie meter. Seven minutes have gone by and then twelve, nineteen, twenty-four.

I've come to the gym at the tail end of the morning rush, and people are starting to clear out. My breathing is loud at the back of my throat. My footfalls sound faster than they can possibly be. And then the last treadmill next to me rolls to a stop, and it's much quieter. A song begins about a man who would do anything for the woman he is in love with, who does not look at him. I feel a flutter like wings in my chest, and suddenly my whole body seems to lift. My stride lengthens and my footfalls slow, my shoulders drop, it is as if I am made of one body and I inhabit myself, as if my legs are creatures I can command. My mind has settled down into my body and is silent. For a collection of footfalls and mile-hundredths and seconds, I belong to myself.

And then it has been thirty-two minutes and my breath is in my throat again, and there is not enough oxygen. My footfalls are louder, my mind claws frantically at the remaining time and how long it is, my legs and shoulders and back resume their individual rebellions. I finish the run, and afterwards I find that my heart rate returns to normal faster than previously, which means I am making progress.

Later

I will not tell you much about the movie Avatar, but if you don't want to know anything, stop reading and go see it.

I am intrigued by how Jake only becomes fully himself by becoming something else entirely. By how the scientists can link human minds to Na'vi bodies and the Na'vi can link Na'vi minds to the bodies of their animals. By how, in the end, Jake communes with the soul of Mother Nature and the whole planet rises to his will, the alien rhinos and dragons massing to destroy the enemies of Pandora. This is what it feels like, I think, when you finally inhabit yourself fully: you are so much more than you thought you were, and strengths you never imagined present themselves. You are not just one man with wasted, useless legs; you are the galloping beasts and the flying banshees and all the trees of the forest. You can destroy your enemies with sheer endless force, and you can run as fast as you want without losing your breath.

Why I am Going to Bed Now

2010-01-07T22:17:00.000-05:00

I often underestimate how much I am ruled by my body. Like, I will find myself feeling really bad and not know why, and sometimes it takes a while for it to occur to me that I am feeling draggy because, physically, I am dragging. I need to catch up on sleep, or go to the gym more (or less), or eat better. Sometimes I notice almost an instantaneous change, that I feel substantially better - better physically, but also happier - after I take a nap, or sit down and rest for a little while, or have something to eat.

This is also, I think, a consideration in terms of long-term happiness. There have been times when I was really, by most definitions, not in a good place - when I was struggling to get through the last few months of my PhD, or when I had a boss who hated me and no local friends - but I was working out all the time and drinking a lot of coffee, so I actually felt pretty good. Not that dosing myself with endorphins and caffeine is a solution to life, but it's something to keep in mind when I'm bored by my job or winter feels like it will last another eight months: having a happy (strong, rested) body helps in having a happy mind.

This shouldn't be suprising. But a lot of people (including, often, me) seem to make it a habit - and a point of pride - to run themselves ragged. Which is sometimes necessary or optimal for short periods, but it is a sad thing that we find it so hard to accept that our bodies need to be taken care of.

also, nobody but me ever closes their eyes in the flash

2010-01-03T13:59:00.000-05:00

I do not think Facebook is very good for me. Not that I am planning to give it up; the whole reason I joined was that not being on Facebook had become more trouble than being on Facebook (and also some friends from high school made a profile for me, and threatened to post their own unflattering pictures on it if I didn't take ownership). And there are good things about it: I get to see what certain friends are up to, the people who fall into the gap between people I know and talk to on a regular basis (who tell me what they're up to anyway, and whose Facebook posts I'm not terribly interested in) and the people I simply don't care about (but am often Facebook friends with anyway). These are people I was friends with, two or five or fifteen years ago, and who I still talk to once a month or once a year, but now I talk to them a little more often, and even when we don't talk I see what they're doing and saying.

But sometimes Facebook is kind of sad. I will be idly glancing at it on a Sunday morning while still in my pajamas, doing nothing more exciting than waiting for my coffee to perc and considering reading the paper, with nothing on my agenda more adventurous than a possible visit to the gym (it's 20 degrees out! in New York we consider that cold! also, yesterday I went to a museum and the movies, and most of my friends are still on vacation. also, I actually have quite a lot I need to do today.) and I get to see pictures of my facebook friends on vacation in Monterey, on cruises, at fancy New Year's Eve parties I wasn't invited to. Which is great, for them, and I'm happy they are having fun and exciting times, but I feel like kind of a loser that I am not having fun and exciting times. I know that much of this is a sampling bias, because (1) they are not doing any of these things right now, actually; they have already done them and are posting photos, probably in their pajamas while waiting for their coffee to perc; (2) I was just in Spain, which was also exciting, and I have posted lots of photos of it; (3) I did not check Facebook the whole time I was in Spain, and in fact I almost never check Facebook when I am doing anything exciting, so by definition if I am looking at Facebook I am not up to much; (4) oh, wait, life is not a competition about who can have the best Facebook photos.

Except sometimes it feels like it is, and like I am very clearly losing. I have two basic cohorts of Facebook friends whose posts make me feel a little bit bad. The first is the people I went to high school or college with, who are my age or a bit older, who post pictures of their houses and families. Which include things like pets and children. (Not babies; children. Some of my friends have actual children now, as in the babies have grown up and gotten their own personalities, which is kind of farcical because these are people whom I can remember being just as inept as me, and now they have gone and gotten married (sometimes more than once) and bought houses (sometimes multiple) and made whole other people, some of whom are better-equipped for life than I am. So, yeah, weird, and makes me feel like I have kind of missed the becoming-a-functional-person boat. And then there is the second Facebook cohort. These people are all people I have met since coming to New York, and they are generally five or so years younger than me. They post pictures of themselves in various flimsy dresses at various apartments, bars, and vacation destinations, with an ever-changing gaggle of flimsy-dress-wearing girlfriends (and the occasional man-looking-mildly-stunned), looking like they are having an incredible amount of fun (and also, frequently, like they are incredibly drunk). I am not sure exactly how this works, that they are having fun, because I'm pretty sure that if I were them I would be in pain from my shoes and/or feeling nauseated from the amount of alcohol they have surely ingested, but I suppose (a) there are pictures of this sort of me, just a lot fewer, so it is possible, and (b) they are not posting the pictures of taking two hours to get dressed, or of their blisters, or of the evil metal-spiked underwear they are wearing under that dress, or of what they look like the next day, so it is unfair to assume that they wake up every morning in full makeup. But these pictures make me feel a bit bad too, because clearly they are having more fun than I even know how to have, and obviously I have missed something.

Sampling bias, sampling bias. I have nearly 200 Facebook friends; one of them is bound to always be doing something unusually fun. It is not, actually, like all of them are posting pictures every day of their babies and their parties; first of all, I can think of nobody who has both, and the vast majority of the pictures are from perhaps two dozen prolific friends. You don't get, in your Facebook feed, "Jane Smith has not gone to any parties in the last month," or "Susie Doe has never taken a really great vacation," or "Ann Jones does not have any children." Many of the people whose feeds provoke feelings of inadequacy are people I only barely know and have no particular affection for; of the ones I do know, I'm pretty sure all of them have problems and issues and not-so-great things in their lives that they just aren't posting pictures of.

Still, there seems to be a clear divide. There are the people who have their lives so figured out that everything they say and do, even on Facebook, oozes confidence and intention. And then there are the people who do not have their lives figured out, at all. I am clearly part of the latter group, and this makes me feel bad. But, maybe I am imagining some of this. Most of the people I am really close to are a lot like me; they have some good things in their life but also problems, and they don't really know what direction they should be going in, and on balance they are pretty confused who they are going to be and are largely making it up as they go along. I have a close friend I used to get really mad at, because I thought of her as kind of a poser. We were very close, but we also hung out a lot in larger groups (this is not typical of me with my friends) and it seemed to me like she acted differently. When it was just us, she was more or less as confused about life as I was, and it was clear that she wasn't entirely sure about the direction she was headed in, and didn't really know where she wanted to end up, and had made some choices that had kind of boxed her in and now was starting to second-guess them. But when we hung out with other people, she never talked about that; she made light of her problems - and of mine - and mocked the very idea that a person could be confused about their life. She acted like she knew everything, like her whole life was perfect and fun, and this made me so mad. Partly because I knew it was a lie, and partly because I thought maybe she thought it was the truth, and it felt like she was getting away with something by not having to figure herself out, by just existing in a state of confusion but laughing loud enough to block it out. Now, I wonder - was she getting away with anything, really? I would say that I don't think all her revelry made her very happy, but she would probably dispute that, and people get to define their own happiness. But maybe she wasn't getting away with anything because that's just what people do; maybe they all have confusions and insecurities and dresses in their closet that are half a size too small, and the ones who are posting pictures of themselves at parties are a little bit worried because they've never had a serious boyfriend, and the ones posting pictures of their babies are a little bit sad that they're falling asleep at 9 p.m. on New Years Eve, and the ones posting pictures of themselves in Tahiti are not posting the pictures of when they got in a fight with their travel companions or threw up from unfamiliar food, and the ones who aren't posting many pictures at all - which is most of them - are mostly just having their lives, but also a little bit concerned that things aren't the way they should be, or the way they would like them to be.

Or maybe nobody ever worries any of this, and I just made it all up.

late-night post on decorating

2010-01-02T01:01:00.000-05:00

The least pleasant aspect of my apartment is the plumbing. The water itself is highly temperamental, i.e. hates me; the pressure is wimpy in the sinks and aggressive in the shower while the temperature is unpredictable throughout. Also, did you know that water could mold? Because that is apparently what is happening under both my sinks (kitchen and bathroom), judging from the smell. I cleaned them when I moved in, to the extent one can clean particleboard, and nothing that I've put there (mostly cleaning supplies bought in the last two months) has the ability to smell that way. So it is the water, I guess, molding.

The bathroom sink is my particular peeve. Actually, the whole bathroom. I know I should count myself lucky because the bathroom is not actually in the same room as the kitchen (a scarily common arrangement in the other studios I saw; sometimes there is a little half-door like in a caricature of a saloon to block off the toilet; other times it's just right there next to the stove), and actually all the broader points are fine. There's a toilet and a sink and a shower/tub. There's a door to the rest of the apartment, and as the crow flies it's a whole four feet from the bathroom to where everyone else in the building walks past on their way in and out. So it's fine.

But it's not... nice. There's a medicine cabinet, which I initially only glanced out, but when I moved in and went to put my stuff in, I noticed it had not been cleaned. In this century, by the look of it. I wiped off all the shelves and then spent half an hour digging grossness out of the door-grooves with q-tips. Also, the shower is about an inch from the vanity/sink. This is a gap not wide enough to fit anything, including my swiffer, but wide enough for me to look into. I did this once, and screamed, and then sprayed about half a bottle of lysol disenfectant (which I only use for special circumstances such as this and not for ordinary cleaning, because it is poisonous) in the gap. I'm sure that accomplished nothing whatsoever but I don't know what else to do.

But, yes, the sink. So the sink, unlike the door-grooves of the medicine cabinet and the space between the shower and sink, is in visual range at all times. The counter is yucky; not so much ugly (it's a sort of generic speckly formica-stuff) as just really old; it has sort of brownish water stains that don't come out. Worse, the handles of the sink... well, they appear to have rotted. I know that isn't actually possible because they are made of metal, but it's like the top part has come off and the inside has rotted or rusted or mildewed. I spray cleaning fluid on all this stuff regularly, but it has absolutely no effect; I assume I am not going to die of sink-rot, but it still doesn't look pretty.

When I moved in, I set about improving the place. The bathroom does have a couple points of character: a delightful seashell-and-seahorse toilet seat and a moon-and-stars mobile above the toilet (the apartment in general is full of character-bits; sometimes that is one of its positive features). I decided to riff on this and create an acquatic theme with bright, cool colors; I devised a complicated layering of shower curtains (clear bubbles over blue cloth over a liner) and bought a blue pebble shower mat and a blue plunger and a toilet brush with its own little stand (I'm very proud of this, because my first post-college roommate had to explain to me that there was such a thing as a toilet brush, and I feel like it's specialized knowledge... I'm pretty sure my parents do not have any such thing). I'm still using my crappy old rugs (someday I will get a nice fluffy new one, perhaps in peach) and towels I bought in... okay, that's not the point, they are old... but on the whole I think I did okay.

Except not, because there was still the yucky sink. I decided over the last couple of days that the problem is that there isn't enough else to look at. I mean, no, the problem is that the sink is gross, but I can't fix that. If this were my apartment, I could rip out the whole vanity and get a new one, but it isn't, and the faucet is too close to functional to count on its being replaced while I'm living here. So given the constraints, the problem is a lack of distractions. The walls of the bathroom are white tile, which is rather pretty and probably quite sanitary, but it really makes the gross, speckly sink stand out.

So this morning when I took down my 2009 calendar - I don't remember where I got it or why, but it's a bunch of landscapes - I cut out the pages that I liked and taped them up on the tile. They fit in well with the color scheme because there's so much blue, and between the seashells and the moon-and-stars it was already nature-y, and they liven up the room quite a bit. I don't know if they distract from the sink on an objective level, but they are new, so I look at them when I go in there, so I don't look at the sink as much.

in which I consider advice on resolutions

2009-12-31T20:43:00.001-05:00

I read somewhere that resolutions are good for you, but only if you keep them. I also read that in order to make good resolutions, meaning ones you will be able to keep, you should visualize them. Like, literally. You should imagine what they look like, or more specifically what you will look like after you have successfully kept your resolutions.

So, okay. Here I am, imagining what I would like to look like at the end of 2010, if I have done everything perfectly. I have a picture in my mind, and immediately there is a problem, because it is a picture of Parker Posey in You've Got Mail. In other words, I have (magically) become a successful and ruthless editrix with a palatial apartment and a large dog that my sweet, funny, bookstore-owning boyfriend (played by Tom Hanks, until he leaves me for an inconsequential blonde; perhaps thereafter played by Patrick Dempsey) walks and cleans up after. So apparently my resolution is to enter the la-la land of big budget chick flicks.

Except not. So what can I learn from this exercise? Well, I think it is encouraging that I am visualizing the Parker Posey character rather than the Meg Ryan character, inasmuch as I am a lot more like the former, and I wouldn't really like to be a dreamy shift-wearing NPR-quoting kindergarten-teacher type. I do think I would like to have a dog, although not in the immediate future since I would first need to move to a new apartment (also, I was cheating - the dog belongs to Tom Hanks). I would also like to be an editor, of course, but that's probably not in the cards. The real point is the professional success of the character, and also her ruthlessness. Perhaps my resolution for 2010 should be ruthlessness.

Spain

2009-12-29T22:44:00.001-05:00

I've been in Barcelona. Not a long trip - just five days or so, over Christmas. Here are some of the things that happened there.

The architecture is amazing. It seems to be divided into two broad categories, "gothic" and "modernista," but there are clear subdivisions. Like, there is the gothic architecture in the Barri Gotic and then there is the architecture in the rest of the old city, which is subtly different. And there is modernista architecture proper, which looks basically like a gingerbread house that has thrown up on itself, and then there is less-famous modernista architecture, which I think is related to American Art Nouveau. And then there is La Sagrada Familia, which is like all the gingerbread houses in the would got together and spent a hundred and twenty years throwing up in a giant twelve-towered pile.
The food, also, is amazing. I did get a bit sick of ham, because I'm just not used to eating much of it, and also of everything being so rich and buttery, but this was really just an issue of too much of a good thing. The food I had was all fairly simple; many of their dishes seem to have only a few ingredients. Common tapas include sausage (all by itself), calamari (which is thousands of times better than the calamari in New York), another kind of sausage, ham, fried potatoes, a vegetable (usually olives or sauteed mushrooms), anchovies on toast or cheese, or still more sausage. So - simple foods, quality ingredients, well-prepared.
The desserts. Again, simple. Ice cream with hot fudge. Hot chocolate. Truffles. (those were the desserts I had, that I can remember... there were also profiteroles, which I'm not super-fond of.) The chocolate is very dark and very good. I'm not generally a chocolate snob, but I can see where they're coming from now.
It rained a lot. Like, all the time. Also, we were ridiculous jet-lagged - we couldn't sleep at night and were debilitatingly tired during the day. Later, a friend told me his best victory over jet lag resulted from taking an early morning flight, not sleeping the night before, and going to bed immediately on arrival. Something to try next time.
Museums. We saw about half of those I'd hoped to see: The Museum of History of the City (excellent - most of it is in an actual archeological site), the Maritime Museum (worthwhile), the Museum of Contemporary Art (not my bag), and the Picasso Museum (very good). We missed out on the Museum of Catalonian Art, the Chocolate Museum, the Joan Miro gallery, and of course all the other museums that we never planned to go to.
Cathedrals. Definitely a highlight. There are three main ones and many small ones that I only saw from the outside. They are pretty amazing, especially when you consider how long ago they were built. That kind of glorious, single-minded profligacy just doesn't exist anymore.
Also, while La Sagrada Familia is a hideous nightmare-bee-honeycomb on the outside, from inside and underneath it is a cathedral, and a monumentally impressive one. They say it will be done in twenty years but I don't really see the point in ever finishing; wouldn't it be better, and also more modernist, to leave it half-constructed, a testament to the impossibility of constructing a proper monument to the divine projection of the human ego?
The best part of the trip - maybe this is true for most foreign travel - was the surprises. Like, we'd be walking in the Barri Gotic and all of a sudden there'd be something sleek and modern and unexpected, like an electronics emporium named Orange or a sex shop. Or we'd be walking somewhere seemingly modern, a block of depressing apartment buildings from the 70's, and all of a sudden there'd be a six thousand year old wall or arch, just standing there. Or the way they had Dunkin Donuts, but it was called Dunkin Coffee. The Christmas lights strung up in the streets. How Christmas Eve was just a regular day, and stores were open on Christmas night, but Boxing Day was a real holiday. Table service even at casual coffee shops, and how they'd never rush you through your meal even if they were full or trying to close. The birds and chickens and roosters being sold in the street.
Other things we saw: A castle overlooking the city and the Mediterranean, accessed by the subway and then a funicular (another trainlike transit mode involving a cable on the underneath) and a cable car. The Parc Guell, which is half a conserve of semi-arid flora and half a modernista display, and the Park de la Ciutadella, which is full of museums and dogs. Two artistic neighborhoods, one "bohemian" (the word the guidebook used instead of "sketchy") and one wealthy. The market, which is like Fairway except much better and slightly less cutthroat. The outsides of several very attractive performance art venues from various architectural periods.
Also, on the way back, they wouldn't let us watch movies on the plane.

So, good trip. Next I want to bike through Italy or take a cruise to Alaska.

what happened last week

2009-12-28T20:30:00.000-05:00

I was at the gym, using the abductor, or maybe it was the adductor, and mulling various developments in my life. I was thinking, specifically, about how I am looking for a new job - which is essential since my current position is temporary and will end in several months - and am considering a significant career change. The consequences of this decision affect everything from my earning potential to my romantic prospects, and in particular may entail a relocation away from New York City, where I've been living for the past year and a half. My mother, whose voice has its own dedicated channel in my mind, urges a course of action that would take me far away from NYC, soon and probably forever, but that would be safe and in some ways easy. I was listening in my head, that evening at the gym, to her insistence on this path, and found myself automatically responding (also in my head) that I didn't want or intend to leave New York, at least for a couple of years. My mother's voice asked why, in the sort of skeptical tone reserved for questioning a child on why it wants to keep a house-invading spider as a pet. My automatic mental response to her question was, "I don't want to leave New York. It's home."

In some sense, this thought has to be discounted, because it occurred when I was at the gym, which is the most serene and happy place to be, at least mentally. But it was an automatic thought that I didn't need to formulate, and that makes it stronger. It happened all by itself, that I called New York home. It's been a while since I've thought of somewhere as home, and even longer - college? - since I thought of somewhere as home while still living there. I did not think, when I moved here very reluctantly last summer, that New York would be the place that would become home for me, but it has. And I did not intend or anticipate that I would become the type of person whom I thought of New York as being populated by, but in some ways I have. This business, of living one's life and becoming the person one is going to be, is tricky stuff.