Fucktards

They wouldn't give me a late checkout time, so I had to rebook my flight, which, honestly, is a way better state of affairs. I really just want to be home for awhile. Do some laundry. I might even be able to get out and go jogging while the laundry's running.

I'm a bit exhausted. Looks like they want me in Denver for a few days next week, then more time in NY... I'm looking to book a hotel closer to downtown. These transit costs are fucking killing me. I could have bought a punching bag with this goddamn money. Spent Sat. night watching HBO boxing with Brendan, which was cool. I haven't watched professional fights since I started taking boxing classes, and let me tell you, it's waaay cooler when you have an appreciation for just how fucking difficult it is for them to do what they do...

Outta here in an hour.

It's Official

I'm in love with that guy at the front desk. We keep beaming at each other. Granted, he's paid to beam, but hot damn. I keep trying to think up ways to take him home with me...

Anyhow, as regulars have likely noticed, blogging has stalled out. We're packed into meeting blocks all week. It's an all-or-nothing business. Just don't expect miracles.

I've gotta get some food and get to the gym... Corp travel is tough. I can see how easy it is to default to bad habits. If I can travel and still get in at least three good gym days a week and continue to watch my food intake (one of the problems with being on somebody else's food schedule is that they've got you eating when they want to eat, not necc. when you're hungry). It's just going to take a lot of work.

Just like anything else.

I think I'm job searching the next time I get back to Chicago. I'm secretly hoping that in their meeting tomorrow, they decide they don't need me to fly into Greensboro, N. Carolina, and I can go home to Chicago for a week or so. I'm also trying to lock down the March 6-9th date for my return to New York - I'd prefer to do the map training they have me slated for in Manhatten as opposed to Minneapolis. Right now they're going back-and-forth with it. We'll see.

Damn, I'm tired. Sorry, I have nothing pissed off or witty to say. This is how pissed off people become conservatives: you make them work crap hours at crap jobs so they don't have *time* to think about what a raw deal the world's giving them.

We could use more pissed off people.

Out & About

Bleary-eyed and functioning on about five hours of sleep, which isn't too bad.

Had dinner in Brooklyn last night with Brendan, which I was nervous as all hell about for a number of reasons. He's the first person who's "known" me through the blog first, and met up with me offline.

In fact, this turned out to be way easier than I gave it credit for, pretty much from the moment I saw him. It was a little bit like hanging out with a smarter version of my buddy Eli (no offence in that dept. Lysha darling), which meant I was pretty comfortable after about five minutes, and felt like I'd known him a long time by the end of the night. Yay. Very cool guy. What was it I was saying about guys from NJ/NY?

I must meet more of ya'll offline. I have amazing readers ;)

More good fun this weekend, and reading recommendations.

I'm now going to go find some coffee...

I Went To Work Today And All I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt

Insane. Insane. I don't know how anything manages to fly around here. Miracles. All of it.

I'm out of here in 45 minutes, fucktards.

This is Just So Incredibly Stupid

Sucks. Sucks. Sucks.

I'll elaborate later. Just frickin' sucks. This is just incredibly stupid. I should be sleeping NOW. I will sleep. Turn off brain. No more thinking. I promise.

Fuck.

Some days, I amuse myself with my utter inability to get my shit together.

Some day, I will be a supah ninjah.

Until then, it's just me, with a brain that won't shut off. Looooong night. The pay off is that there will be some neat bows to tie off afterward, a weekend of siteseeing, and then, real life. I could use some of that.

Well, Shit. If Nothing Else, It's Gonna Be Damn Interesting.

Or, not.

You never know.

I'm going to bed. It's a Tylenol PM night.

On Being White Trash

I've talked before about being the oldest child of a couple of burger flippers, but I haven't really talked about what it was like, socially, to be the daughter of fast-food employees; however much I enjoyed my time in the restaurants, the kids at school, the people we knew socially, didn't really see it as a terribly enjoyable experience. Fast food was something you got away from, fast.

Fast food was white trash.

I can remember a time for about two years when I'd go so far as to say my parents were "poor," though we'd likely be "lower middle-class" by anybody else's standards, cause we always had enough to eat. For about two years, my parents were paying their bills with credit cards (now that they own their own business, they're doing this again - another one of my eternal battles is figuring out how to figure out money). My sister and I were subsisting primarily on scrambled eggs and macaroni and cheese. I suspect that my aversion for scrambled eggs has something to do with being presented with yet another dinner of scrambled eggs when I was five or six.

Things got better, but when we played show and tell at school, I didn't particular want to bring in my parents. When I was younger, I resented the fact that all of the other kids seemed to have mothers who baked cookies and didn't come home smelling like grease every night. When I'd go over to other kids' houses, their mom cleaned the toilets - in my house, I learned how to clean toilets when I was four.

My mom was always really adament that her kids become self-sufficient. We chose our own clothes every morning (which lasted until the day my sister dressed herself for kindergarten and forgot to wear underwear. My grandmother was horrified, and from then on, she would set out clothes for us every morning and re-dress us when my parents dropped us off at her place). We learned how to cook a remarkable amount of macoroni and cheese and grilled cheese sandwiches (I have an especial fondness for all sorts of cheese, to this day). Every Saturday or so, we cleaned the house, working with our mom from a big to-do list. Whenever we'd go out to restaurants, even if it was just the local diner, my mom would give us a rundown on basic restaurant politeness, napkin over lap, "excuse me," "thank you," and which fork to use (when we were at places with two forks).

"Someday," she'd say, "you're going to go out to a nice place, and you don't want to look foolish." What that meant, really, was "You don't want to look like white trash."

In fact, I've always sort of viewed my family as about one step to the left of white trash. The kids I hung out with either lived in a trailer packed with ten kids or lived in a crapped-out moldy place down the corner, or the dilapedated barn down the street (somebody did finally gut that fucking pigsty and redo it from the inside out).

When my dad worked some weekends for a stump grinding company, my sister refused, refused to have him pick her up from school in "the stump grinding truck" because it was so incredibly white-trash looking a vehicle.

The one time my dad did this, she burst into tears. "What's everyone going to think of me!" she cried. "It's bad enough that when everyone asks, I have to tell them you work at a burger joint!"

The one thing I never, never, learned how to do was dress like anything other than white trash. That's something I've been spending the entirety of my 20s working on. I just don't understand clothes. I don't know how to buy them. It doesn't help that fashion's not made for women who look like me. Throw in the fact that I have no idea what looks decent on me, and it means hours and hours and hours of crappy shopping time and a lot of stuff that makes it home and then gets thrown out when I realize it's way crappier in real life than it was in the store and "Sweet fuck, what was I thinking?"

The last time I went shopping, I went to Nordstrom in downtown Chicago, and I stood in the middle of the shoe store, holding two shoe styles I wanted to try on, feeling incredibly out of place among the Beautiful People who all hustled about looking busy like they belonged there, and nobody was coming up to help me, and I thought, "They can see it, can't they? They can totally see that I'm really white trash. That's why nobody's helping me, that's why --"

"Can I help you, ma'am?"

Er. Yea.

It's funny, though, how the white trash thing still stirs me sometimes. It's one of the reasons I find it so funny to be in these meetings, to put on a suit jacket. There's just this incredible feeling that I don't fit here. I keep waiting for the moment when some hotel clerk yells, "Aha! White trash! I knew it!" and kicks me out of the hotel.

I'm waiting for the corporate dinner where there's a fork I don't know how to use (though to be honest, many of these guys wouldn't know how to use it either). I worry that I'm being too nice to the waitstaff, do they think I'm being condescending?

It's funny, what follows you.

Once I got older, I realized that in fact, my mother had done me an incredible favor by being a working mom, by teaching me early that I needed to figure out how to do shit for myself. I have a friend back home who got married and realized that, in fact, toilets do not clean themselves. Her mother had done all of her laundry, cleaned the house, made her bed, for her entire life. She had no idea how to do any of it on her own, and no set routine. I have another friend who moved out and managed to burn a can of instant soup: she'd never cooked anything before. And there were others, mainly women, but lots of guys I know, who don't understand how to work for a living. Who don't know how to do an interview. Who don't know how to write up a resume. I'd been working informally for the burger joints for years, and done so many crap jobs since I was 16 that I don't even find interviews scary anymore. I clean my house every Saturday (yea, the toilet too). I can cook - sure, mostly only what can be cooked in a wok, but I can cook. I learned how to be self-sufficient really quickly. Nobody did it for me. When I moved in with a guy who *wasn't* self-sufficient, problems quickly ensued, cause I ended up playing mom. Let me tell you: I'm never doing anybody else's fucking laundry ever again.

But for the most part, I got a great gift, being the sort of white trash who had two parents who worked their asses off. They knew about work ethic. They knew that even if you fucked up everything else, if you got up and went to work everyday, you'd keep scrambled eggs in the fridge and kool-aid on the table, and some days, that's enough.

Ohh... I Found the Nice, Cozy Robes

Ohhh, I found the complimentary fuzzy robes in the closet, and the umbrella, and the ironing board, and... and the actual room rate here (they're billing a "government rate" of $111.00 on my corp. card). The actual room rate?

$350 a night

::snicker:: ::snicker:::

I feel like I'm getting away with something EVIL.

This One's for Brendan

Cause Jenn's already read it.

"ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"

Oh, The Insanity

Wow. This is an insane business.

Blame it all on Blaine. I'm here through Sunday night, and now it looks like they'll be shipping me off to North Carolina Monday morning. Then back to NY for map training Feb 28-Mar 3rd (downtown, this time, if I have anything to say about it). And they're floating the word "Dallas" around a lot more lately.

My brain is pretty fried, as we've been talking about microwave engineering all day, and I'm not an engineer. I don't think I actually believed them when they said this was really what they were going to make my job into: flying into a bunch of cities and setting up project support and document controls for all of our wireless projects.

I'm ordering some traveling weights. I'm heading to dinner now, then to the gym.... I'm starting to understand why all of these guys are packing around an extra 80lbs. We do nothing but work really late hours and live out of hotels and eat crap food.

I might have something more interesting to say later, after food and workout endorphins have kicked in. Right now, I'm out of it. Need to make travel arrangements for downtown tomorrow, too. We've got jam-packed meetings, and I've already pronounced rather loudly that I'm out of there by 5pm, cause I've got a dinner meeting downtown.

I'm definately not doing this for more than a year. In fact, the next time I get some breathing space, I'm calling my recruiter. Seriously. I'm not getting paid enough. I do, in fact, have an actual life *outside* of work, which requires me to *spend time doing it.*

Damn, I'm hungry. Gotta run.

New Jersey, pt 2

But hot damn, these New York/New Jersey guys are fucking hot. They shipped in some guys for the meeting from NY and surrounding NJ, and then there was the guy at the front desk, "Are you still with me, miss?"

"Huh? Oh, erm, yes." Honey, I'll be with you anytime you want.

Fuck.

It's not a pretty-boy hotness thing, it's an attitude. These guys took everybody to the table in the meeting, chewed at them until they realized somebody knew their shit, and then everybody was the best of friends. I must have fallen in love four or five times since I've been here.

This may also have something to do with the fact that it's mid-month, but hey, hormones can be great.

Got stuck at the table next to that pesky architect, who felt it neccessary to talk about some of his dating woes. Poor guy. I almost felt sorry for him. He's tried speed dating, and the 8 @ 8 thing in Chicago, and he says he feels like he should just submit a resume before he even goes, it feels so much like a job interview.

I successfully managed to not talk at all about my own thoughts about dating, who I've dated, or how I felt hanging out and drinking with this big table of guys all night (yea, once again, 20 people, only two of us women - the usual); which I enjoy doing because I swear there's an office pool bet going about whether or not I'm a lesbian, and I want to keep that up in the air as long as possible, because it amuses me.

I did end up thinking a little bit about love tonight, because we had dinner early so the local guys could go home to their wives, and I was thinking about Mosh and CP, who haven't been home in a month. In Mosh's case, his wife holds down the fort, including the kids, and in CP's case, his wife is home about as much as he is, cause she does a shitload of work with us. And of course I'm thinking about Yellow, who's also single today, and angsting about it, and who just wants to find the right sort of woman at the right time so he can settle down, so he can have a family. And I was thinking about couples, and how the hell you make this stuff work, long-term, in an age of ever-increasing scrutiny regarding looks, and aging. I was thinking about our instant gratification culture, shortening attention spans.

How do you love someone, when you don't even know how to look them in the face?

And why bother staying with someone when things are tough, if you're not financially dependent, if you can take care of yourself? Because a lot of what held together marriages in the past was dependency. Somebody had to do the laundry. Somebody had to pay for your food. If you were really lucky, you'd start to like each other after a decade or so, and maybe after twenty or thirty years, you'd be in love. Then, luckily, you’d die before you figured any better. Love can be like that: familiarity breeds comfort.

Yet despite all that snark on my part, I'm not cynical about love. Not real love, not the real thing. In fact, it's something I think would be pretty neat. The problem with love, the sticking kind, is that you're in it for the long haul. That's the scariest part about it, loving somebody. Going, "You're fucked up, and you'll probably fuck up again, but you know, I like you anyway. I'd walk through fire for you."

And if you're lucky, they feel about the same. It’s the mutual part that’s the toughest.

Doesn't happen often. And certainly hasn't happened to me, not really, so I suppose I can't talk much about it.

I walked back up to my hotel room (it's like a fucking apartment. It has three fucking sinks and two TVs. What the fuck am I supposed to do with three sinks?) after dinner, and changed into my pajamas and scrutinized my body, poked at those places that don't please me, leaned toward the mirror, looked deep into my own face, wondered what, exactly, other people see there. What do people see, when they see me?

And I thought of all of those boys I shuddered over today (in a good way), thought of all of their imperfections. I couldn't tell you what drew me to them, it's just... this thing. It's something. It's a looks issue, yes, but not pretty looks, not perfect plastic people.

One of the things I like about having dinner with the Boys is that everybody I work with has been to all sorts of different places. India, Germany, Poland, bullshit places in the US, all over the US, everywhere - and they have really great stories. They have all sorts of things to talk about, lots of projects. They've lived. And I can just sit around and drink beer and listen to them, and of course, I have my own stories, so sometimes I can join in, but mostly, I just listen, because I love stories. I love people who've lived.

Maybe I saw some of that in those boys. Maybe I saw men who had stories, and attitude. What I always wonder is what men actually see when they look at me, because I'm not traditionally "hot." I'm not remarkable, except maybe in heels, when I'm 6ft tall and look like I can kick your ass. Then there's just sort of awe when people look, and that's a different sort of attraction.

So there's something else people see, and I know that they see it, because I know a hundred guys who love to sit and chat with me but wouldn't be caught dead dating me. And, of course, two hundred more who would date me because they thought my cool life could make up for their crappy one: the vortex people.

I was stuck in the airport, and CNN was on, and they were doing a bullshit interview with that matchmaker in that NY Times article, and she said the top three things women looked for in men was:

1) Intelligence
2) Sense of humor
3) Character or integrity

I had to agree with that, and found myself nodding. Then she gave the top three for what the men who come to her are looking for:

1) Attractive/good looks
2) Thin body
3) Younger than him

Luckily, the sorts of guys using her service aren't the sorts of guys I'd be interested in (why the hell would I want to date a guy a decade older than me?). But shit, could you imagine limiting your possibilites like that?

Shape magazine just did a study that says that only 2% of women describe themselves as "beautiful" and only 9% (9%!) consider themselves "attractive." Shit, women, I've got low self-esteem, but even I'd call myself attractive.

People get older, people make money, people acquire things, and as they get richer and make themselves better looking, they start to look at people like things, too, to be bought, sold, traded in. Upgrade. Download. Whatever. Everything else is so fast and easy, why not this?

And I thought about Yellow saying, "I think I found the girl," in reference to the woman he wants to marry and have kids with. Not "I really connected with this amazing woman," but basically, "I think this one fits the bill." And I think about another guy I work with, who's also 35, and just got engaged to a woman he's been dating for two years when - not six months ago - he was moaning about the woman he "should never have broken up with" back in San Diego.

What the hell are these guys thinking? "She's easy and convienent and here at the right time in my life, and she likes me, so why not?"

I guess that's how it should work for some people, or... no, no, bullshit. No fucking way.

You want to spend the next thirty or forty years of your life with somebody, really? Like, truly? No bullshit?

Then you better find somebody you’re fucking wacky about. Your blood better boil. You better get giddy. You better be thinking about them when you go to sleep at night, when you get up in the morning; you better be thinking of them in the middle of the night, shit, when you can’t sleep. You better be wondering about what they’d have to say about your day, about that bizarre person you bumped into on the train. You better know when you see the absolute perfect thing for them. You’d better want nothing more than to move heaven and earth to hang out with them.

Cause what the fuck else are you going to have to go on when you’ve been together five or ten years and gotten older and complacent and comfortable? What else are you going to have to go on but the memory of that fire, and working toward feeling it again when you two get too cozy? Why the hell would you want to spend any amount of time with somebody who didn’t drive you fucking nuts?

I really had nothing to say when that poor architect brought up his dating woes, because… I had no woes. I had no sad Valentine’s story about why I was there and not pining after an actual SO, only imaginary ones. I was amazed to be there at that table, actually, sitting somewhere in New Jersey where I could see highway signs that said, “New York City.”

I am twenty-five years old, and I was one of two women sitting in a room full of men running projects worth millions of dollars, and even though I hate this dumb job and I’m not going to stick with it longer than another year or so because it doesn’t challenge me, it’s not my passion; still, when I touched down in that stupid plane I felt like I’d won something. This was what my parents worked so damn hard for. This is why I worked all those bloody stupid jobs. So I could – even for just this moment – not have to spend my life flipping burgers. So I could be twenty-five years old with a corporate card and going to New York for the weekend and keeping a place in Chicago with hardwood floors. So I could live well, so I’d have a 401(K) and medical insurance.

This is it. I win. All of it.

And whatever happens from now on, whatever stupid thing I do that might get me back to working at Starbucks while I go to law school, or go back to living in a cockroach-invested flat while trying to write books or whatever – whatever happens, I’ve got this. I did this. I did that perfect, right, corporate kick-ass powersuit thing, and I did OK at it.

It’s not my thing, this powersuit crap, and I know that. That’s why I hate it. That’s why I’m not writing enough. That’s one of the reasons lots of other stuff is stalling out. This isn’t my passion. I could care less about it. And though, in the short term, not caring about your job is great, in the long term, it sucks away your soul.

And I’ve chosen my out, and I’m out of here in summer of `06, and on to other things…

But tonight, this night, after good food, decent beer, good stories, I can tell you my life feels full.

Love, love, love. Yes, there are people I care deeply about. No, marriage and children aren’t on my list. Yes, having lovers in foreign cities would be fun, if I was that sort of person. Could I ever find a partner? Somebody to share this big, wacky, ever-changing life with?

Well, miracles happen. Sometimes.

But mostly, I think, we just live. And it’s funny, and warm, and cozy, and good, and you live with friends, and family, and you find some affection even for your wacky co-workers, and that’s it. That’s life.

It's messy. It's life.

Now go to bed, and don't bitch at me cause you're doing it alone, cause you know what? I'm sleeping alone, too, and have been for some time. And you know what? That's OK. It's not lonely, it's OK. Yea, there are people out having sex tonight, and a lot of it's probably great, but some of it's probably not, and they're sitting awake lying next to somebody who they thought they knew really well, somebody who's turned out to be a total stranger, who doesn't give a shit about them at all, who's not going to understand them, who doesn't know why they read books, and they're going to sit next to that person and feel a big gaping vortex of their own and wish they were single, wish for this night, just this one night, to be alone with their own thoughts.

The grass is always, always greener.

That's life, too.

Make your own life. Nobody's gonna match it all up for you. It's your game. Your pieces.

Move.

New Jersey

I'm not impressed.

Night Thoughts

An incredibly lazy day, full of me wondering why I felt so stressed-out and lethargic (answer: cause my brain won't shut up). Watched a lot of movies. Realized blogging has given me a shitty attention span. I'll need to start taking out my internet card when I sit down to write. This shit's gotta stop.

I also realized something tonight, feeling incredibly tired, worried about missing this week's MA classes, wishing that this week I've so looked forward to was just *over* already, thought about all the things I wanted to do, I needed to do, how silly I was for being concerned about stuff of very little importance that I really shouldn't even be thinking about... and I realized that it's never going to be perfect.

I'm never going to get everything done that I want to do in a week, cause that means trips to New York or Glasgow or Egypt won't happen. Getting locked into the "perfect" routine only means that I'll be less flexible when the good stuff comes up.

I'm never going to have a perfect week. It's never going to be perfect. I'm never going to get everything done.

Relax. Sit back. Enjoy. Have fun getting on a plane. Hope for clear weather in New York/New Jersey.

Enjoy yourself for once. Shit, woman.

I'll be up early and on a plane tomorrow morning, heading out. Mixed feelings. Books are packed.

And I'm incredibly, incredibly tired.

Web Hosting Going Down

Jenn is switching out our internet service provider this weekend, so I've gone back to stealing bandwidth for my title image, for the short term. I'll also be losing my webpage hosting space for my personal webpage, photopage, and profile photo.

These will be out of commission. I'll take out the links to them in my profile when I get back from New York, and go back to using Hello or something until I can figure out the deal our new provider gives us. Kinda sucks. Comcast has got a great user-friendly upload service now. Bah.

I'm So Disappointed

Go Vote for Mouse Words

Amanda's up for the Koufax Award for Best New Blog. Go vote for her, please. This is for a good cause. She deserves wider recognition, and this is one way to go about that. She doesn't have any ads, her content's all her own (it's not a group blog, or sponsored by any party), and it consistently kicks all ass. Voting is easy - just fill out a comment at the site above and put "Mouse Words" in it.

As an aside, she's also the only woman on the list of eight (best I can tell), which sure the hell is interesting, considering that there are actually more women bloggers than men.

Very interestting. And that's all I'll say about that.

Vote.

50 Books I Need to Finish This Year

During good weeks, I can get through 2-3 books a week on the train. Unfortunately, I've been spending most of my train time lately listening to music and staring off into space. Like my writing, my reading has been suffering.

It's time to get back on track.

In preparation for my trip, I've compiled a quick list of the 50 books I either need to start reading or need to finish reading this year, roughly in this order (an asterik denotes those books I'm currently in the middle of reading):

1. Romance of the Three Kingdoms(volume 1 of 2)*
2. Shriek by Jeff VanderMeer
3. The Male Body by Susan Bordo*
4. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel by Susanna Clarke
5. The Persian Boy by Mary Renault*
6. Love by Toni Morrison*
7. Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Nasland*
8. War in the Shadows: the Guerilla in History by Robert B. Asprey (in fact, I need to buy this book - I'm accuring a lot of library fees for it)*
9. Orlando by Virginia Woolf*
10. Dreaming by the Book by Elaine Scarry*
11. Secret Life by Jeff VanderMeer
12. Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brien
13. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
14. Golden States by Michael Cunningham
15. The Histories by Herodotus
16. The Insult by Rupert Thomson
17. Tess of the D'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy*
18. The Boundaries of Her Body: The Troubling History of Women's Rights in America by Debran Rowland
19. The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler*
20. The Trumps of Doom by Roger Zelazny
21. Blood of Amber by Roger Zelazny
22. Sign of Chaos by Roger Zelazny
23. Rats and Gargoyles by Mary Gentle
24. On War by Carl Von Clausewitz
25. Gloriana by Michael Moorcock
26. Half the Day is Night by Maureen McHugh
27. The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates
28. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
29. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber*
30. Iron Council by China Mieville
31. Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews by James Carroll
32. Oriental Mythology by Joseph Campbell
33. Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi
34. Natural History by Justina Robson
35. A Harlot High and Low by Honore de Balzac
36. Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac
37. Homosexuality and Civilization by Louis Crompton*
38. Fool's Errand by Robin Hobb
39. Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson (must... fight... through... it)
40. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
41. A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis by David M. Friedman
42. Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation by Thomas W. Laqueur*
43. Bloodtide by Melvin Burgess
44. The Dress Lodger by Sheri Holman*
45. Same-sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe by John Boswell
46. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Naroibi by Luise White
47. Latro in the Mist by Gene Wolfe*
48. Brightness Falls from the Air by James Tiptree Jr.
49. Feminist Social Thought: a reader by various*
50. Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

And yes, for those wondering: all of these books - except two of the Zelazny - are, in fact, actually sitting here in my house.

Our latest book count?

1541

Thus concludes this morning's procrastination post.

I'm Sorry. I Have to Link to it.

I just keep clicking over to John's place and snickering...

I'm so easily entertained. It's like I'm twelve or something.

Why Jogging is Like Sex

You really want to do it. You know it's good for you, on some level.

But you know, the first few times, it's not all that fun, you're not terribly sure what you're doing. In fact, you're not even all that sure that your body's supposed to move that way. But those first few times you know that afterwards you feel pretty damn good - and sometimes during - and you know, afterwards, you want to do it again.

The more you do it, the easier it gets, the more you actually like it not only when you're done, but while you're doing it. You find yourself the right music, the right partner (hey - some people have jogging partners), figure out how to breathe properly, how to feel confident in your skin... you stop being so self-conscious, and it gets easier, and more fun, and you look forward to it.

I did just over three and a half miles today, which meant I was doing more walking than I would have liked at the halfway point, and I took the tunnel at a walk. I started to default to self-hate talk, and shut that off when I reminded myself of conversation I was having with a blogging buddy about level of difficulty in the tasks we set ourselves in our lives.

Jogging is hard for me. I spent the vast majority of my life reading and writing books, and though I enjoyed playing outside, I lived in the Pacific Northwest, and the weather was always for shit. I recognize that there are other people who spent their childhoods involved in sports, who carried that on into highschool. There are a lot of people whose families don't have a propensity for obesity, who didn't celebrate the binge-and-purge cycle, who don't have propensities for alcoholism and depression. And I know that a lot of those sorts of people won't have to fight as hard as I do for what seem to be such incredibly basic things: like jogging three and half miles, or staying at a reasonable weight, or not sitting down to table with a feeling like they're going to war against themselves.

They won't understand me and my battles. In fact, they'll think my battles must be petty things, because obviously, they've wanted to eat more than their fill on occasion, and if they have the willpower, why can't I? If they can get up at four thirty in the morning and go jogging, why can't I?

The answer, of course, is that I can. It's just that I'm going to have to work harder at it. It means I'll have more low days. It means that some days, I'll have to walk more. Some days, I'll eat more than my fill. Some days, it will be harder. I'll have to fight harder.

And one of the biggest things I have to come to grips with this year is that it's OK that I have to fight harder. It's OK that this isn't easy.

I spent my whole life thinking that whatever it was I was supposed to be doing with my life should be easy. I should take the easiest path, take only those choices that fell in front of me, that passed through my life. I should not fight for anything that would be hard, difficult, complicated. In fact, I should not fight for anything at all. If it was meant to be, it was meant to be. If not, it would slide through my fingers like sand.

Problem was, I didn't realize that I did, in fact, have the option of closing my hand and holding onto that sand, instead of waiting around for the wind, the rain, the bitchy guy on my right, to come over and take it away from me.

Now I live my life a lot my feel, by making connections, by viewing all the paths open and moving toward the ones that feel right. And when it feels right, but doesn't come easy, it doesn't mean you're doing the wrong thing. It just means that doing the right thing often means doing the hardest things. Sometimes the best things in life are the things you have to fight for.

Since I made that decision, nothing in my life has been easy. Pieces have fallen in place, dominoes have lined up, but I had to work my ass off to gather money, resources; sometimes flights didn't line up, I've had to argue with people. I've had to send strongly worded letters. I've had to beg favors. I've had to accept those favors. I've done favors for others. I have worked crap hours at crap jobs so that I could make something bigger and brighter work. I have learned that being passive and accepting only what comes easily may be the simplest sort of life, the sort of life that others may want to live, a life that may bring them not only contentment, but happiness.

But that is not the life I want to live. And that's not the person I want to be; someone who casually accepts whatever comes her way. Who passes off on whatever is the most difficult, no matter how much her heart says otherwise.

I want to be a fighter. That's what I do. This is the life I want. I don't expect it to be easy.

In fact, it can't be easy. Ten percent of everybody's life is luck. The rest is hard work, and persistence.

Anybody who tells you different is selling something.

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