Oh my God. I am so annoyed. With Facebook.

(That I took the time.  To make.  This dumb diagram.)

Click to enlarge.

The Continuing Adventures of Becky at Audubon Park

Last time we caught up with Becky at Audubon Park, she was buying a stranger $4 worth of gas and being given the offer of life-long friendship (and more?) in return.  Let's see what our intrepid runner got up to today when she at last ventured back to her one-time daily running spot...

Becky, who has run three of the past four days and has just finished up her 24th mile in that time period, is feeling pretty fucking good about her general physical fitness as she plows ahead with this marathon training business.  Justin Bieber starts on her iPod and Becky thinks, 'hellz to the fuck yes, I'm going to cool down by walking another mile and rocking out to this shit.'

A quarter mile in, she is quite literally stopped in her tracks as she is waved down by a young woman standing in the middle of the path ahead of her.  Becky reluctantly removes her headphones.

"Will you jog with me?" asks the young woman.

Becky takes her in.  She's overweight, dressed for the mall rather than exercising, and looking Becky up and down like she's simultaneously not to be trusted and yet undoubtedly holds all the secrets to life's battles with weight issues.

"Sure!" says Becky.  Why not round up the half-week's mileage to 25?

And with that began one of the longest miles of Becky Heineke's life.

****

To begin with, this woman had no intention of jogging.  She ran all of ten feet and then stopped.  "I sure wore the wrong bra!" she said.  Followed by, "I sure wore the wrong pants!"  Followed by, "I sure wore the wrong clothes!"

"How old are you?" she asked me.  I told her.

"WHAT??!  Giiirrrrrrrrllllll!  WHAT?!!  Look at me!"

I looked at her.

"Giiirrrrrrrrllllll!  You look 24!  What the...but you're so cute!"  Because of the lack of continuity in that statement (29-year-olds can't be "cute"?) I wanted to tell her that it's not me that's cute, it's the Maybelline mascara and freckles I've never grown out of.  Instead, I thanked her for the compliment and dodged her various and specific questions about my thirtieth birthday party, which is months away and not something I've even contemplated at this juncture.

"Giiirrrrrrrrllllll!  I'm itching now!"  We stopped for a moment so she could frenetically scratch her legs.  "Where's my car at?  Have we gone a mile yet?  I'm so tired!"

"Where did you park?" I asked her.

"I don't know where my car is!" was the response.  Considering her level of exhaustion at the half-mile point, I assumed she must have parked somewhere in the vicinity.

"Is that your car up there?" I asked, pointing to a car near the three-quarter-mile mark.

"Yeah!" she said.

But it was not.

"What??!  That ain't my car!  Where did I park?"

We chatted a little about her job, my job, where we lived, about how much her legs were still itching...

"You go to Shoe Carnival?" she asked me, looking at my shoes.

"Breakaway," I told her.  I gave her my ablest sales pitch.  She looked skeptical at best.

"I bought some Asics at Shoe Carnival," she said.  "I'm wearing those tomorrow.  I'm going to go one mile today.  You going more than one?"

I told her I wasn't, neglecting to mention the four miles I had run before the one I was currently walking with her.

"I'm going to go two tomorrow and just keep working my way up."

Then she told me her diet.  Her carb intake.  The salad she had for lunch today.  We'd slowed to a snail's pace by the time we hit three quarters of a mile.  "What?!?  We haven't even gone a mile yet?!"

She wasn't the only one thinking it.  She pulled out her phone.

"Yeah, we're running up at this park.  You at the house?   What?  No!  I'm jogging right now!"  By the time the call was over, I had steered us to the parking lot where her car was, cutting off a tenth of a mile or so but congratulating her nonetheless on making it a full mile.  Of which she had "jogged" roughly three yards.

"This your park?" she asked me as we parted ways.

"Yeah, this is my park."

"Then, I'll see you!" she said.

And for the second time in as many visits, I made a vow to avoid the area for the immediate future.  Only me...

Things I Shouldn't Admit in Public

Sometimes...when (for whatever reason) I need to "defrag"...

...I listen to rap music very loud and rap along while playing various solitaire games online.

Weird!  I know!  But I find it calming.  I started doing this in college, when I would listen with headphones and silently mouth along so as not to alert my neighbors (and roommate[s]) to my extreme strangeness...

Two nights ago it was Eminem and spider solitaire.  After an hour of that, I was a new woman.

And I should also note that when I do shit like that, I have a lot of thoughts about how much I appreciate being born in the time period I was and not, say, into the time period of cavemen.  And then I start thinking about how cavemen likely had simultaneously much harder and much more satisfying lives on account of being so intricately tied to their survival on a day-to-day basis, and how much of the modern world (like, oh I don't know, online solitaire and rap music) has sprung not from any real need for the item at hand but because humanity requires more and more distractions the further and further we get from our primal state, and it is likely that very lack of connection to our existence that leads to our desire to remove ourselves from the reality of the futility of life itself.

And that explains probably all one needs to know about why I find it necessary to defrag in the first place.

That's all.

Heeeeey, I Think I Love You!

Was there ever a more exquisitely inane piece of sugary pop perfection than "I Think I Love You" by David Cassidy?  To me, it is the pinnacle of fluff music:  there's nothing to touch it in terms of being catchy while simultaneously being innocuous to the point of meaningless.  It is a masterpiece, and it launched the teen idol career of David Cassidy, who cheerfully sang it during episodes of the first season of The Partridge Family.



And now it's the name of a book.  A book about worshipping at the altar of David Cassidy.  A book that as soon as I heard about it, I wished I'd written. 

A book that, somewhere in the course of reading it, reversed my exuberance about the concept.

Some thoughts:

1.  Like The Help, I Think I Love You is a story from multiple narrators.  Like Abraham Lincoln:  Vampire Hunter, it is told partially from the first person and partially from the third.  Using one of these two storytelling tactics can work.  Using them both left me not quite fully engaged with either narrator.

2.  In addition to parallel storylines from more than one character, another trend in modern literature is The Mother Who Thinks Her Daughter Is Unattractive.  I'm just going to make a general motion here on behalf of the emotionally damaged public:  we need to retire these mothers.  They're overdone and they depress the hell out of me.

3.  Why is every adolescent in literature sexually active at an age far earlier than average for the time period in which she lives?

4.  Why is every adult male in literature a wanton man-whore who has slept with more women than he can recall off the top of his head? 

5.  Why do adult women in literature always anonymously hook up with moody man-whore men in public places?

6.  OH MY GOD, I'M SORRY THAT MIDDLE AGE SUCKS.  Seriously.  I really, really am.  Personally, I can't wait to hit forty years old just so I can know how much I have ruined my whole life and wasted away my youth with horrible, cheating men and feel the life drained out of me by my unappreciative, bitchy offspring.  Truly.  I am waiting for this day.  So maybe, in the meantime, we could have fewer books out there that deal with this so the feeling isn't spoiled for me when I come to experience it myself.

7.  This is a pink book.  It's pink!  It's about a happy, girly crush on David frickin' Cassidy!  And everyone in it is sad through the whole goddamn book.  Speaking of which...

8.  ISN'T ANYBODY HAPPY ANYMORE?!

9.  Parts of it were absolutely brilliant.  Parts of it made me realize that the reason I didn't write this book is because I couldn't write this book.  The descriptions of David himself and the passion with which every detail about him was savored and stored away and cherished...I felt it with every ounce of my being, and know that I am not yet skilled enough as a writer to convey that type of emotion with such aching perfection.

10.  I'm also apparently not old enough to be so jaded with life.

Novels written for "adult" audiences frequently leave me grieving on behalf of modern humanity.  Selfish and self-destructive behavior is treated as normal and universal.  And yes, I am fully aware of the irony of me writing that when my own book was about me (it's all about me!) spending my mid-twenties chasing down a movie star, trying to get something from him which I knew, deep down, he didn't have in him to give.

But I would hope that anyone who read my book would come out of it feeling that they had just read about life, and not life-is-awful.  I think that's what was missing from I Think I Love You for me.

It's David Cassidy, for Christ's sake!  How horrible can the rest of it really be?