Not Concentrating

Oh, but you don't go!*

I did not run that 5k yesterday.  I wanted to, I swear I did.  I even intended to.  But my schedule got turned upside down recently and I had to go out of town for a few days before the race; from Tuesday to Sunday I wasn't outside at all, really.  And, adding insult to injury, my body was kind enough to endure the host of indecencies I forced onto it, like skipping meals, barely sleeping, and hardly drinking any water.  Oh, and the beer.  Even so, my friends tried to convince me to give it a go, but I just didn't think it would be a good idea.

There will be a next time.

* Five points to the first person who knows what that's from; only two if you happen to be related to me by blood.

Day-to-day

You may know, especially if you're following my twitter feed, that I started "running" six or seven weeks ago.  Running is in quotes here because, frankly, I can't in good conscience call what I do (or at least what I was doing in April) actual running.  I know too many people who are bona fide runners (not to mention the marathoners) to put any of this in the same category.  But after a long winter of sitting and knitting, and now that I live in a part of the country where pools are ridiculously hard to come by, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and get my ass outside.

I live very near a lake, on relatively flat land, and there's a decent turnaround point 1.1 miles up the road.  Also, I believe in costumes, which probably sounds weirder than it is: I believe that having activity-specific clothing can help with a bit of the motivation (not to mention the execution) so I went and got myself a new (orange!) running shirt. 

By the time I got motivated enough to go (and the weather had inched high enough above freezing), I'd already lost a race to the starting line, which is too bad (motivation number one down the drain).  But my need to counter the winter was still strong enough for me to get up and go, even knowing I'd never make it the full mile, let alone the 2.2 round-trip. But I was heartened by the several stories I have from friends who started at ground zero and worked their way up to serious distance running.  Alternating running and walking (I have no idea what the increments were, and they definitely shifted), I made my way there and back.  Then I slept for pretty much the rest of the day.  The next day, everything from my waist down was in unbelievable pain.  But after a few weeks of going out every other day (or sometimes, let's face it, every other other day), I was able to make it one way without stopping, and then recently I "ran" the round-trip distance straight through. 

I have never done anything this consistently without someone giving me a schedule or dragging me out.  Ever.

Earlier this week I decided to expand the route a bit, for a few reasons.  First, even though much of the second mile was still a struggle to finish, turning around at the 1.1 mile mark seemed like it was messing with whatever semblance of a stride I was hitting at that point.  Second, the last bit of my run is on a [very] slight incline, which is hard to go up if you're already struggling; I figured that expanding the flat part would help me push to expand the distance I was getting without forcing me to strain too hard on the uphill battle (as it were).  Third, in the interest of getting into some sort of shape, the goal of all this is to get and keep my heart rate up, which will only happen if I can sustain the running for longer than just the 2.2 miles, so continuing to make the route longer seemed like a good idea.  As it happens, 2.65 (or so?) miles was not a hard distance to expand to.

That's when I started investigating if there were maybe any 5k races in the area I might be interested in running.  I mentioned the possibility to two friends, both of whom were sure that I'd be able to do it (despite the, er, "rolling" course description).  This morning, though, I started playing out the conversations wherein I would say, "Don't get your hopes up, folks.  95% humidity is not easy to run in and I really doubt that I can get there in a week." I've been running in fantastic weather recently, but the tides have turned and the gods are turning against me a little.  I was about to write the race off entirely.

And yet.

2.7 miles this morning, in the insane humidity, all taken care of.  That 5k is definitely back in the Maybe Pile.  And I'm thinking about taking the quotes off my "running."

... and thus begins the weekend

They are a compelling example of the traditional newsreel turned on its head; here without the same story compilation, the inauguration newsreel narrates contemporary history and activates a collective audience through its cinematic presentation.

Maybe not the most auspicious way to stat off the holiday weekend with a sentence like this, but here it is.  In all its "best"-ness.

A whole new vigilence

I was thinking the other day about how great it is -- how thankful I am -- that anyone out there still comes by here to see if I've got anything to say, even if those people are actually Google's spiders or who knows what.  And it got me to thinking...

I've expressed here more than once my general admiration for a blog that doesn't exist anymore called Best Sentence of the Day.  This woman posted a sentence a day as she wrote her dissertation and it struck me that this probably is a good time to start sharing my brilliant sentence writing with you.  I can't imagine that sentences will be the only thing I'll post (and, let's be honest, I won't be posting every day, but I'll try for the days on which I write), but doing this definitely will mean that I'll have no excuse for lack of material, right?  I'll try to at least make the sentences interesting (if not totally obtuse and ridiculously academic sounding).

And so, well, here I am in the middle of trying to finish Draft Three of my dissertation proposal, tentatively titled Immediate Mediation: A Narrative of the Newsreel and the Film, and I bring you today's gem, simple and to the point:

The images stand as records of time in motion far more than as formal capturing of events.

KnitWrit

 

Three years ago, almost exactly, I started this blog.  There was, and continues to be, no particular theme other than the ramblings of my generally stress-addled brain.  Graduate student life is particularly bizarre and, as it happens, difficult to explain.  Dissertation writing is even more so, tenfold.

In the last few months, as you already know, I started to knit; I last knit some time around 1981, when this photo was taken.  I'm pretty sure that's as big as that "scarf" ever got before I put down the needles in utter frustration.  But it turns out that knitting is an amazingly helpful hobby when you're writing your dissertation if for no other reason than that pretty much every time you sit down to work on it you can see the progress.  Ten more rows done, one episode of Boston Legal watched, and all is well.

Dissertation writing is hardly that rewarding.  Because writing is a forever ongoing process.  You write a few words, a sentence, a paragraph, whatever, but you're going to read that paragraph over and edit it (a few times); you're going to give that essay over to someone else and they're going to have a whole list of changes for you to make.  Even a finished product is never done.  It can be (or, well, is) agonizing to write much of the time (in a good way) as you sort through the thousand trails of ideas and thoughts and books and conversations you've had and weave them into some vaguely cohesive document.  This is always how writing is and has been.

Last week, after a particularly bad day, I was talking to a friend about how frustrated I had become with a hat I was making; it's an easy pattern and I'd already had to rip out and re-do a chunk of it.  Now I'd have to totally undo another big piece.  Knitting, in my world, is the anti-writing.  Knitting just is.  Sometimes it gets confusing and you have to look at things closely, or unravel a bit to fix something, but usually it's pretty smooth sailing. 

I was struggling to remember that, in fact, this is completely wrong.  Experienced knitters constantly rip out entire projects and re-start them to adjust any number of things.  And I am not an experienced knitter.

The frustration of knitting mistake is not just that I didn't get it right the first time.  Though, yes, that's frustrating.  It's more that there is a kind of feeling of loss at ripping out pretty decent work.  That sounds melodramatic,  maybe, but it's true.  A lot of time and energy went into it and it's just being erased without a trace.  Sometimes in writing this happens, but it is rarely on the same scale; a paragraph may get cut (or moved to the footnotes), but large pieces of hard-earned writing are almost never just slashed.

My friend, evidently, has a far clearer understanding of these things.  While I'd spent part of the evening trying to convince myself that, no, it wouldn't be a big deal to fix the hat, and I should get a grip, she already had already chatted with another friend about how knitting is really a process, like writing. 

Cooking, she thinks, doesn't come with the same devastation and loss at this kind of failure and, honestly, I think I agree.

Seriously?

The establishment of public libraries, like censorship laws, expressed a widely felt determination to impose moral direction on a cultural marketplace thought to be undermining cherished values.

 -Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media

Scarves for everyone!

I had to accept the charity of my mother starting this one off, but otherwise all of this is my handiwork.  Weird that after about 30 rows my stitches seem to be getting tighter, but that's not something I'm going to worry about right now.

It was all set

A few hours ago I was feeling victorious. 

My mother taught me how to knit some time around 1981.  By that point I had been needlepointing, I think, and maybe even embroidering, and she taught me how to knit as a next step.  I liked to knit but stopped for good when the purple scarf I was making for myself somehow became a trapezoid instead of a rectangle.  As some sort of consolation prize, Mom promised to make my "scarf" into a dress for Barbie (no, I really didn't get very far).  It was a switch I insisted on not so much because Barbie was in need, but because it meant that I wouldn't have failed.  Project conquered: dress completed (it was always meant to be a dress, I swear).  Needles down.

Over the last, what, ten years?, knitting shops have popped up in all of the least likely places.  You all know this.  Knitting is cool again!  And for a while I've been walking in and out of yarn stores the way I once walked in and out of fancy paper stores, ogling at the selection and touching pretty much everything.  So now that I'm old and mature and not working all night and all day, starting to knit again would be a good way to counteract all the television I've been watching.  It's productive!  It will engage my inner (and outer) perfectionist!  What could be bad?

This weekend in a knitting store I spotted some nice yarn that was discontinued (so it was super cheap!) sitting next to a simple-looking sample scarf.  Perfect perfect perfect.  I'll take it.  But there was no time for mom to cast on the yarn while she was here (like when I was little and I couldn't bite into an apple unless she bit it first) but that was no problem.  I have the internet, and the internet will teach me the mysterious ways of the knitting gods.  I can learn.  And I am patient.  And I am an adult.

Except knitting is hard, and I have the frustration threshold of a highly aggravated three-year-old.

There was going to be a triumphant photo up here to show you: a successfully started scarf with stitches lined up all in one or two lovely rows.  Just like ducks!  I'd have this scarf all ready to go by, say, next Christmas for sure.  But it was not meant to be. Instead, I sat on the couch concentrating intensely on my needles as I slowly and carefully cast on five individual stitches (accompanied by only mild yelling) .  I'm not sure I can stress to you the extent to which I resembled my six-year-old self with my slow, purposeful moves.  But the five lovely (and, at least, identical) stitches didn't look quite right, so I put the needles down and waited for my mother to call me back before I got any further.  Her sage advice was that it didn't matter -- as long as the stitches stayed together, it would be fine for me and my soon-to-be-scarf.  OK, no problem.  That's when it all went horribly wrong, the screaming got worse, and the stitches got pulled out.

... and you don't even get the picture of me knitting when I was six, which is somewhere in New Jersey and not available to be scanned.

This is the part I understand

It seems not to have occurred to anybody in the cited cases that freedom of opinion was repressed in the exertion of the power which was illustrated. The rights of property were only considered as involved.  It cannot be put out of view that the exhibition of motion pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit, like other spectacles, not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded by the Ohio Constitution, we think, as part of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion.  They are mere representations of events, of ideas and sentiments published and known; vivid, useful, and entertaining, no doubt, but, as we have said, capable of evil, having power for it, the greater because of their attractiveness and manner of exhibition.

- Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, et al.
United States Supreme Court, 23 Februrary 1915

The colors of football

In twelve years of primary and secondary education, I spent only two of them in the public school system; 7th and 8th grades were maybe not the wisest choice for that kind of educational switch, but my adolescent misery is a topic for another time.  Nonetheless, one of the most interesting things about public middle school was home ec; even though the school system had long since shuttered the wood shop, the gymnastics gym, and the ceramics studio because of budget cuts, in the late-1980s Maplewood Middle School still had fully functioning teaching classrooms for cooking and sewing.  Maybe I've mentioned this before?

As with so many other things, any student who'd gone through the program in the last several decades could tell you the home ec curricula, scheduled down to the week; pizza day in cooking class was legendary.  Also, the classes had long since been gender-neutralized, a process that yielded some spectacularly bizarre sewing projects -- 7th grade, footballs; 8th grade, surf boards.  The other day I was digging through a few things in my parents' house and came across this, my pink and yellow corduroy football.  Because doesn't that just make you want to go out and toss a ball around?  Really, what could have been less useful?  The way I remember it, we were graded on how clean the seams were and how precise the corners were, as well as the evenness of the post-production hand embroidery.  My form here, as you can see, was pretty good; as it turned out, I liked to sew.  Not visible here: my initials, embroidered into the opposite pink panel (another assignment requirement; the decorative heart, however, I doubt was).

You'll have to click through for that one.

NaBloNoPo

You may have noticed that I haven't been around much.

That's fine, you know, I'm not going to make excuses.  But I'm back now. 

Old dogs and new tricks

click through for more detail and to see an excerpt of her campaign speech

A few of you may remember that in 2000 I threatened (publicly) to launch a campaign for president in the 2004 race.  There were hurdles, sure, but I was ready to make the sacrifice.  In those salad days, such lofty aspirations seemed possible, my friends, as we know because 2000 was the year that Barbie made her first run for high national office.*

Just yesterday I saw a friend change his Facebook status to say that he was ready to throw his hat in the ring for Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, and to him I say he should reach for the stars!  What are we without our dreams?  What are we without our public standards?  Who are we without our solid blue (or red) outfits?  Nothing!  No one!

Honestly, I do not mean this as a veiled political dig at anyone.  Really.  But it did seem like the perfect time to show you all a photo of my Barbie doll, a Chanukah gift from my brother in 2000 (he was duly confused by the request), enjoying the morning sun in my new backyard.  Because, seriously, how cool is she?

* I think she ran in 2004, as well, but I don't have the physical proof.

Unforeseen consequences

This is an old photo -- there has been very little sun here this summer.  Besides, the close-lookers among you will notice that this photo was taken during the fall season change, which hasn't happened yet.

I am back.  Or, well, I am not back; I am elsewhere.  I am in Western Massachusetts, I am watching the Olympics, I am working on my dissertation, I am working in retail, I am unpacking, I am swatting flies, I am driving daily, I am watching The Colbert Report, and I am eating cheese.  So some things have changed, but not everything.

The road trip that got me here lasted a bit longer than others I've done in the past, just under three weeks.  Sad as it was to skip the hikes and parks that are so much a part of the western US, I had decided a while ago that on this trip I'd prioritize a more meandering route so I could see friends in places I don't usually go.  It was a great trip and I did, indeed, get to see a lot of people, many of whom were generous enough to let me sleep on their couches or in their spare rooms.  You are all amazing.

Settling into life here is an ongoing challenge -- I've lived in studio apartments since 1999 and have often complained that there just is nowhere to go: no table to eat at, no couch to sit on, no bedroom door to close (and, though this has nothing to do with size, no TV to watch; this was particularly frustrating over the last year). Here, though, there are tons of options, including cable, so I've been spending some quality time frying my brain (as my father used to say).  And this means, of course, that I'm not spending 14 hours every day staring at my computer, because I just don't have to.

Which brings us here.  To this.  To a non-update.  I have to admit, that I haven't had much to say recently.  I come, I go.  There will be more entries here, I just don't know anymore how often I'll be able to check in; this fall there will be a lot of traveling (all work-related).  I'm sure that once I get a regular schedule and my anxiety levels amp up again, there will be all kinds of inane things to clue you into. So don't tune out yet!

More on this later

There is a very long story behind this picture.  That is the only road that gets you anywhere when you're 13 miles outside of Page, AZ.  And that is a very long line of parked cars.

On the run

Today, officially, I start to drive away.  It's been a ridiculous few weeks, but they're over now and off I go.  I will possibly be updating here from the road, but it seems far more likely that little updates will show up at flickr, twitter, or what-have-you before I get the chance to sit down and write anything interesting here.

I'll be on the road for at least two weeks, so I'm sure there will be tons to say by the time I'm done getting where I'm going.  In the meanwhile, keep me posted.