rules

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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!

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.