Running and love

Running is hard.

The problem isn’t that I find it physically difficult—though, to be fair, I do. But usually a combination of Kate Nash, endorphins, and the desire to exercise without paying a monthly membership fee pull me through.

No, running is hard for a much more benevolent reason—the same reason, really, that I write so rarely.

I love it.

In college, I never saw this problem coming. In college, the loves and passions of life were cultivated on moments stolen from homework, my job, internships, and, well, my other job.

In college, I dreamed of having hours to devote to the pursuits that inspired pure bliss.

Six months after graduation, though, I have this to report: I can barely get myself to do any of it. I have the hours, but the devotion bit? Bafflingly hard to come by.

That’s not to say that the thrill was entirely in the chase. I still love, for example, every step of writing this blog.

The pen and paper step. The step where I send it to Jane and she laughs and asks me if I've been reading Elizabethan literature lately. And the resulting last step: trying to write like I’m capable of conversation.

Then there’s the absolute terror of posting—and, finally, the peeks through the cracks between my fingers as a bizarre and lovely realization washes over me: people actually read this.

The moments of difficulty and terror are a nonissue, then, because the whole time, my love for this shit fuels me.

   

Running, though. Running is an entirely different matter.

Difference No. 1: I am a terrible runner.

Seriously, I run like a bear. I've recently begun running like a slightly lighter bear, which I consider a major milestone, running-wise, but the whole ursine thing? Probably not dissolving anytime soon.

Related side note—to the guy who takes up the entire goddamn sidewalk while texting: Come on, man. Please just move. IT’S NOT LIKE YOU CAN’T HEAR MY ASS COMING.

Anyway. Difference No. 2 relates to the nature of the risk.

When I write, the risks are mainly rejection and apathy—powerful, but conquerable with a healthy dose of knowing you don’t have anything to lose.

When I run, there’s a very real possibility of physical injury.

For instance, a run a few weeks ago began in typical fashion: stated otherwise, for the first 10 minutes, I felt like I was going to die.

But then the 10 minutes passed, and I realized nothing but the run even mattered.

I felt light. I felt giddy. I felt like a little kid—like I was playing.

  

And then I felt something else.

My knees, hands and forearms slamming into the cracked pavement of University Street.*

As I lay there, prostrate and bleeding, I realized that I lacked both (a) any idea what to do, and (b) the desire to be on the ground anymore.

There was only one thing to do, really—the only thing any of us can do when we totally eat shit doing something we love.

I got up and kept running.

*boom

Remembering remembering remembering

The day after I turned 20, I bought a notebook at the old Borders on State Street in Chicago.

It was stupidly overpriced—something like $6 for a composition book—but my need for it was desperate.

I was two weeks deep in a summer spent at my parents’ house. The misery was more constant than increasing, so to say it foreshadowed the divorce would be biased, if not false.

Either way, though, I needed, badly, to remind myself of the world outside LaPorte, Ind.—and so I wound up sitting in the window on the second floor of Borders, scratching words into a notebook.

I remember those moments like a snapshot: the protestors on the street below (and the passersby stubbornly ignoring them), the people scanning the shelves that sandwiched me, the tiny handwriting defying my paper’s wide lines—simple, yeah, but bizarrely clear.

The next months, in my head, are exactly the same. I remember that notebook, and everything else I remember only in its context.

To be clear, I journal like a fiend, but never have I treated it like a chronicle or a diary. I record thoughts, feelings, books, ideas, but almost never things that actually happen.

Those things, then—I remember them because I was writing.

I learned once that we remember some events and not others because of the presence of other people. We remember socially, our strongest flashbacks always with a co-star.

If you know me at all though, you know that I am mad introverted and would probably set a building on fire if I don't get enough alone time, a fact that should in theory wipe out a good chunk of memories. But for whatever reason, they’re still there.

My hypothesis? Writing. Well, writing and reading.

Both make my mind shut up, forcing me to feel the blood in my veins and the fact of my breathing—forcing me to remember my often-forgotten aliveness.

And maybe they’re social, too. Both presuppose two people: writer and reader (even if she’s a future self).

The terrifying bit, then? What happens to moments where I didn’t read or write or speak? Do they just vanish, the first to be forgotten?

Mayhap. I remember nothing else of that day in Chicago. I must have taken the train in, eaten lunch somewhere. But all I remember is sitting in that window at Borders, like the rest of the day didn't even happen.

Hell, maybe that’s why I read and write almost obsessively. If all we have of the past are memories, then what happens to a past we forget?

Bitch can't dance

I spent Friday night watching clips of So You Think You Can Dance and crying like a baby.

Sorry to disappoint anyone who might’ve thought my existence was somehow cool. I’m bilingual and play the ukulele and once hitchhiked across the fine country of Denmark, but at heart I’m a playground-visiting, linguistics-researching, goose-bumps-seeking nerd.

(I posit, then, that while cool is ephemeral nonsense, kickass we can attain by, you know, unabashedly liking shit and being nice to people.)

Anyway, in the world of the kickass and nerdy, 9 o’clock (or, perhaps more accurately, “a bottle of champagne in”) on a Friday tends mean being on your stomach watching Youtube videos of competitive dancing TV shows.

Three things should be mentioned here. One, I know absolute dick about dancing; two, I am oddly obsessed with SYTYCD despite never having seen an episode; and three, I am consistently the least graceful of any given group of people.

This was a given from pretty early on — I’m talking glasses at 18 months old — but the more serious consequences of my literal lack of depth perception didn't pop up until a few years later. I was about five and, because God apparently needed a giggle, wound up on a YMCA basketball team.

It was during the first game of my kiddie hoops career that I let a basketball hit me in the face because I lacked the instinct to throw my hands up to block it.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” my father says when he recounts the story. “It was just so…bizarre.”

True life. My dad, by the way, was the coach of that particular basketball team, and he even laughed when it happened.

So no — God no — no dancing for me. Unless, of course, you count my friends making me play DDR so they can laugh at me, something I can’t even be mad about because it’s so genuinely entertaining.

Thank God, though, that the appreciation of dance is something far more innate and carnal than the actual ability to do it. The world’s supply of Melanie Moores is limited, but the number of us stunned to silence upon watching her? How can that not approach 7 billion?

To watch someone dance is to watch something human, as essentially familiar as it is alien.

I watch Melanie Moore and comprehend that the thing creating the beauty — the body — is something I have, too, by simple virtue of my aliveness. Though, on most of us, the body usually is far from awe-inspiring, leaning instead toward wholly unremarkable.

And why shouldn’t it be? Why take heed of something as commonplace as a body? What in a body merits awe?

Those questions become so much less rhetorical when I watch Melanie Moore dance.

My mind and mouth shut up, opting, maybe not by choice, for awe instead of hate.

That’s a body. That’s what I have. That’s what people can do.

Dancing, then, tempts us: Maybe the reality of the commonplace is its potential for beauty.

Writing, to me, is just the same. It’s words. It’s language. And for it we can only thank the fact of our humanity.

But somehow, when the pen is in the right hand, when the right mind strings the words together, it transcends language without ever becoming something else.

Using the ordinary, it creates something that breaks up the sickest illusion of being a grown-up (or, maybe, of being alive): the illusion of the limits of monotony.

The perils of office chit-chat

The real world is horrifying.

The normal words of douchey condescension — the warnings of the difficulty of the job search, bills, early mornings, whatever — in the end turn out to be pure bullshit.

Job search. You send out resumes. You interview. You get hired.

Early mornings. You suck it up and get out of bed every day.

Bills. You show up to work. You get paychecks. You use said paychecks to survive and/or have Happy Fun Time.

Granted, these steps all have their complications (the first one especially), but the horror? It’s not in the difficulty.

It’s in the monotony.

Shit’s boring in the real world, and the total lack of interesting conversation accounts for a huge slab of the boredom.

This fact reared its unfortunately banal head during my second week of work.

Due to the apparently rare habit I have of reading things, I had just read an article accompanying a picture of a man — a man in an unbuttoned dress shirt with “feminine” hair and make-up.

The photo pretty brilliantly points out that the illegality of women baring their chests in public is problematic. The reasoning is well ingrained: Women, obviously, have breasts, and breasts aren’t just body parts. They’re scary, private body parts meant for sexy time and sexy time only.

(1. That was sarcasm. 2. The tangent regarding what makes a body part erotic and what makes erotic bad is an important one, but as I’m shooting for 750 words here, it’ll have to wait.)

I found the picture and article important and fascinating, so much so that I felt pulled to what I thought was the sane & expected course of action.

I wanted to talk about it.

Fast-forward to about 7:45 a.m. a few days later, when a co-worker and I were alone in the five-person office I helped occupy at the time. I already knew that she was smart and at least slightly feminist, so my guppy, post-college brain figured the picture would be perfect discussion fodder.

As anyone who has worked in an office for more than three months can probably attest, I was horribly wrong.

“I agree that the image is provocative,” she said, picking each word with care, as usual, as though the slightest misspeak would set off some office bomb detonated by casual or interesting conversation. “But I think that the laws regarding women exposing their chests should remain in place.”

To this day I can only understand such lines of reason hypothetically; I can grasp that people think that way, but I’m totally lost as to the how or why of it. (The same applies to people who take the Bible literally and those who genuinely think Everybody Loves Raymond is funny.)

So I pressed on.

“Why, though?” was my innocuous-enough question. “What is it about certain body parts that makes them somehow dirty?”

She stumbled through a couple citations of irrelevant statistics, mainly involving, I think, male arousal at the sight of naked ladies. I pointed out that numbers aren’t actually arguments, but as the option of concepts was lost on her, the conversation eventually died.

The failure of that exchange bothered me for days; the almost-chat was my first hint of the scarcity of the chances to have an interesting conversation outside a university.

Turns out, though, that the issue went beyond stubbornly literal thinkers, something my boss pointed out during the performance evaluation I had after two weeks at my job.

“Katie, you’re remarkably self-assured for a 22-year-old,” he began, looking across the desk to where I sat, straight-backed but comfortable.

“Well, thank you,” I said, unsure of whether the emphasis was meant to be on “remarkably self-assured” or “for a 22-year-old.”

“However,” he said, face firm with the discomfort of someone who abhors confrontation, “some topics of conversation are too — well — personal for office talk.”

It’s been almost three months and I still reel at that word. If he had said “academic” or “non-bullshit-small-talk-y” or even “political,” I’d have been on board — annoyed, but on board.

And so I learned that the office is a bit like a public high school: The nerds have to stay silent to avoid disrupting the social order and causing, you know, thought to happen.

Because one of the horrors of the real world is that non-corporate brainpower is a serious no-no.

So yes, I work full-time. I pay my bills. I feed myself. No big — we get a blueprint for all that.

I just wish someone had warned me of what my boss’s intended descriptor for the topics forbidden at work —

“Interesting.”

Saving Giles (i.e., how I stop myself from killing my roommate's cat)

I work in a goddamn cubicle.

Every day I wake up at 6. Every day I catch a 7:10 bus so that every day I get to work at 8. Every day I work for four hours, lunch for one, and work for four more. Every day I leave the building again at 5, wait by the bus stop, and return to my apartment.

Every. Single. Day.

Twenty-two years have taught me at least one thing that I know won’t change: I absolutely abhor routine. I can’t sit still, I can’t stay in the same place for very long, and I sure as hell can’t do the same thing day in & day out without wanting to kill someone—or at least my roommate’s cat. (He’s kind of an asshole, though, seriously.)

In job interviews, I often tout my ability to adapt quickly to new situations, but I’ve since learned that there’s one tricky key element to that skill…

I need new situations.

Now, I learned years ago the importance of having a strong identity outside of my occupational or academic obligations; I knew better than to be just a student/RA/intern.

I knew that at least of equal importance was the fact that I speak French and play the ukulele and drink too much tea, that I edit and journal almost maniacally, that I put so much stake in reading that I’ve never felt more anxious than that during gap in between books when I’m not sure what to read next—and that, more than all of it, I love love love the people in my life.

I just had no idea how hard it could be to remember all that when stuck in a cubicle 40 hours a week.

I’ve heard from grownups that the key to maintaining happiness once morphing into a corporate drone lies in how you spend your off hours.

This mindset, though, always reeked of bullshit to me; the obvious implication is that 40 hours a week, I’d be a non-entity, giving myself up entirely to the endless expanse of cubicles, to a world in which I have to leave my cubicle and crane my neck to look out a goddamn window.

Some people probably have the gift of establishing a new identity for any given situation; they have a Work Self and a Parents Self and a Friends Self and a Class Self, and they glide in and out of these identities with ease.

My main question for these people, though, is this: who the hell are you when you’re not at work or in class or with other people? Who are you when you’re alone?

Maybe it’s a fault of mine that I only really have one Me figured out; maybe the ideal is to cut out dozens of little niche Me’s that go beyond the inevitable & slight behavioral modifications of Every Single Day. Maybe it’s a mark of my immaturity that my Me is sole.

But Jesus. I can say with certainty that were I to have established identities, I’d get lost in the Every Single Days that fill up 45 hours of weekly work and commute time.

So I have to conclude that the Me I have is enough; I have to be her and enforce her and let her grow, Every Single Day.

I have to read and allow the constant mental translation into French and play my ukulele and drink my tea and call my family.

Otherwise, I swear to Jesus, I’m going to wind up killing that fucking cat.