The Less Serious Side of Things

Every year, during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I go out and buy a new journal for the new year.  In times past, before I started in on the new one, I’ve gone back and read through the old one, astonishing myself with how long a year really is and how unnecessary it was for me to record four to seven sentences about every freaking day of my life.

This year, I am going to spare myself the hour or so of reading and recap the year's journal contents for you from memory (don't worry; I remember all the highlights).

You know how we were talking about how Taylor Swift writes songs about things that the rest of us know instinctively to keep to ourselves and not broadcast to the public?  This is the sort of shit I write about in my daily journal.  As a fitting cap to a year that saw me use this blog to tackle more serious issues than I ever have publicly before, I thought it might be nice to offer you a glimpse into what else I was thinking and writing about this year.

What Was Up with 2012, According to My Journal

1. I got really excited about Downton Abbey.

2. A little over a year ago, I developed a full-fledged crush on [the potential of] a guy in our running group and was gutted beyond measure when he passed me over for someone who is pretty much my exact opposite in every possible way.  Their relationship coincided with him suddenly never showing up to anything, ever, so I had a lot of opportunities to whinge to my journal about how not only did I have zero game, but I was also incapable of forming normal human friendships.  (Both of which are obvious lies, but they worked nicely within the framework of my self-pity narrative, so I went with them whenever I got drunk.)  My determination to make this all about me was drawn out for an embarrassing length of time, and of course I recorded it all, so there’s a lot of that from this year.

3. A little over two years ago, I developed a full-fledged crush on [the potential of] another guy in our running group and this was ridiculous because clearly there was absolutely no way we could ever function as a unit.  Nonetheless, I would periodically revisit my interest in him, and every time, something would happen and I’d get really angry.  Angriness happened twice this year – the second time, I hit some sort of invisible limit and haven’t thought of him the same way since, but the point is that I was still wasting emotional energy on this person after two full years and I wrote quite a bit about it as if this wasn’t moderately psycho of me.

4. Multiple times I extolled the virtues of New Age music.

5. I ran well over 900 miles this year.  Every goddamn time I ran, I wrote about it.

6. There was only one two-day hangover this year, but I wrote about it for, like, four days because if there’s one thing I like, it’s beating the dead horse of being irritated about feeling sick on behalf of a few hours that really weren’t worth it.

7. The presidential election was this year.  I get emotional about politics, but of course I do because I get emotional about Downton freaking Abbey.  This year saw many, many mentions of Statistics God Nate Silver, as well as a discussion of my irrational fear of casting my ballot for the wrong person. For days prior to voting, I was gripped by panic that I would accidentally vote for Mitt Romney.

8. In 2012, I read 60 books (!) and over a dozen short stories.  My very favorite book that I read all year was The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman.  It’s about a boy named Nobody whose entire family is murdered in the first few pages and then he goes and lives in a graveyard and is raised by ghosts.  I wish I’d written it. But since I didn’t, I wrote about how I wished I’d written it.

9. Two good friends got married this year, and a bunch of people had babies.  The weddings I wrote about the days of, since I was there for the festivities.  The babies I usually mentioned a few days after the fact, like, oh yeah, I forgot – so-and-so had a kid. With weddings and babies both, my recordings are usually blasé because marriage and procreation are two of the most basic functions there are in a society, so I can’t ever think of much to say about them.  This is not an opinion I voice to any individuals involved, but my journal gets it all the time.

10. THE WEATHER.  I write down the temperature more often than just about anything else…

11. …except maybe “How I’m Feeling.”  I like to end the week with a several-sentence recap on Sunday night, which is a terrible time to do it because on Sunday night, I’m probably watching Downton Abbey and so all I write is how happy I am that I’m ending the weekend by watching Downton Abbey. But sometimes I’ll also say that I’m feeling “restless” or thereabouts.  When I feel “restless,” there is a 98% chance that the next week I’ll say I’m feeling “hopeful” or “accomplished.”

12. I also record my menstrual cycle (because I like to chart how it syncs up with the phases of the moon) and my feelings of “restlessness” and “hopefulness” can be directly correlated to where I am in my cycle, but I refuse to acknowledge this and instead always, always, always write about how “I don’t know” why I feel the way I do.

13. When John’s home, I’ll write about what he cooked for us; 100% of the time, it’s something ludicrous that took him five hours to make and tastes like consumable bliss.  This is the only time I ever write about food, and if you knew the way I cooked for myself, you’d understand why.

14. I saw fewer movies this year than I have in any year in recent memory (22), but the good ones (The Dark Knight Rises, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Lincoln, Life of Pi) got a parenthetical four or five word review on the days I saw them.

15. I once filled up an entire day's entry wondering if I should get a third fish.  In the end, I decided it would be too much responsibility and instead acquired a eighth plant.

***

2012, man!  It happened!  It was a pretty good year for me, and if we learned anything from the last entry, it's that "pretty good" is some kind of alright.

I'm headed back down to Mississippi to see my parents and brother, so if I'm not back here in the next few days,

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!

And I hope that each and every one of you has a pretty good 2013. ;) 

What do you know – the world didn’t end!

Well, chums, Christmas Day is fast approaching, and I hope that it’s a wonderful day for any and all who are reading this right now!  (Unless I don’t like you!  In which case, you can suck it.)  (Haha, kidding, of course.) (Sort of.)

In this week’s Newsweek, there is an article about New Year’s resolutions and how we just can’t ever seem to stick with them.  In consolation, there were some helpful tips about making lifestyle changes in small increments instead of overwhelming yourself by setting huge goals, and my favorite part of the entire article came when an expert on such matters recommended being purposefully mediocre every once in a while.

Just give about 60%, is what he said, and then who cares, and also you’ll probably wind up impressing yourself because for Christ’s sake, it’s not that hard to give freaking 60%, so maybe you’ll accidentally give 65% or something, and whoa – success!  (And wasn’t that better than putting undue pressure on yourself to give 100% and then being disappointed when you actually wound up giving 0%?! Exactly.)

So when I say I want you to have a wonderful Christmas, I truly do mean it, and I just as truly believe you’re going to pull it off.  If you’re reading this right now, that means that the human race wasn’t extinguished in a fiery apocalypse on the winter solstice this year (fuck you, Mayan calendar), and if you set the standard at that level of low to begin with, how could you NOT have a great holiday?!

BAM, I just saved Christmas, you’re welcome.

(I like this mediocrity idea.  I spent pretty much all of 2012, my first year of my thirties, being “super-earnest” and trying “extra hard” to always be the best Becky and all that, so it could be an interesting experiment to spend 2013 just fucking phoning it in and see if I actually get more done.  It might be worth exploring…)

I’m so glad to know each and every one of you, congratulations on not dying in the apocalypse, and

MERRY WHATEVER THE HELL HOLIDAY YOU CELEBRATE!!  HUGS ALL AROUND!

An Obligatory Response to the News

You will not hear me say this often, but every once in a while, something happens and it’s so big, so complicated, and so overwhelming that I’m actually slightly relieved that my paycheck doesn’t depend upon me writing about it.  What could I possibly say?  Where would I start?

Gun control?  I could talk at length about the obvious…  Or I could talk about how astonishing it is to watch politicians – some of them quite conservative – shake away the fog and admit it’s time to change.  (I could even keep it strictly solipsistic and discuss what an awful coincidence it is that in the post before this one, I made a crack about lunatics still being able to get their hands on guns.)

Mental health?  The “somebody had to know” mentality sweeps us all after these things happen and right on schedule, a mother who “knows” reached out to us, the public, for help.  I could talk about that, about how the media is sanctimoniously filing her blog post under the heading of Starting a Conversation.  But a conversation about what?  (About how idiotic commenters are on the internet?)

News coverage?  It’s always the same:  wall-to-wall, then talking about how wall-to-wall doesn’t help anyone, then talking about how talking about how wall-to-wall doesn’t help anyone is distracting from the bigger picture, then discussions of “tragedy porn” (and its close cousin “disaster porn”) and how dragging it out makes it worse but in merely talking about it, we’re dragging it out, so around the circle we go again…

What if I skipped it all together?  What if I talked about my NBC war correspondent boyfriend Richard Engel, and how learning he’d “gone missing” yesterday dropped my heart right out of my chest?  Or about how I sighed in heavy relief upon learning this morning that he’s okay? (Or maybe I should talk about emotional attachment to the people who bring us the news.)

I could talk about my weariness of the “fiscal cliff” and how my head aches with every mention of this utterly made-up (and, let's be honest here, lame) conundrum.  I could talk about how re-watching An Inconvenient Truth a couple of nights ago reminded me of what’s really at stake, beyond our anthropomorphic thinking on absolutely freaking everything.

I could talk about “information overload,” and how the course I’m listening to right now on 20th century philosophy rightly questions whether this inundation is shaking us at the very core in how we define the “self.”

I could write a hell of a lot of things, and I could mean every word I wrote about all of it, and by the time I hit “publish,” there'd be something else to talk about.  There's just so much out there.

This time, I want to take the road less traveled.  When everyone else is talking, sometimes the best thing to do is be quiet.

I’ll be back with a (lighthearted!) Christmas post…but in the meantime, it’s my holiday wish for all of you that, every now and then, you give yourself the gift of turning off the news.

Thoughts on Our Twentieth President (I Can Feel Your Excitement from Here!)

I recently read the book Destiny of the Republic, about the assassination of James Garfield, and now, as is my wont, I would like to share some thoughts about it.

We don’t talk a lot about James Garfield when we wax poetic about our mighty former presidents.  We don’t even wax poetic about him when talking about our mighty former presidents who were killed while in office.  We just don't think about him – unfortunately, he didn’t get a chance to do much before he was shot in the back by a lunatic in a train station in 1881, just a few months into his presidency.  The wound itself was not fatal, but his doctors’ treatment of it was.  Garfield languished for two months, never complaining as he grew ever more infected, finally slipping away in what must have been a horrendously agonizing death.

It’s hard to say which part of this story is the craziest – that the man who shot Garfield was so delusional he thought that after killing the president, the public would revere him and elect him president himself…that Alexander Graham Bell, who had just dropped the telephone on us, worked around the clock in a pre-X-ray world to create a machine that would find the bullet (a machine that worked, but didn’t find the bullet because doctors, utterly convinced they already knew where the bullet was, didn’t use the machine on the correct side of Garfield’s body)…or that Joseph Lister, over in England, was stirring up a revolution in medicine with antisepsis while here in America countless professionals, insisting on age-old traditions of wearing lab coats splattered with blood and puss and sticking dirty fingers into wounds, blew him off, and wound up killing our president in the process.

Or maybe the craziest part is that Garfield didn’t even want to be president.  He went to the Republican convention in 1880 to nominate someone else, but so swayed the crowd with his speech that they ended up (much to his horror) nominating him instead.  (To think that there was ever a time when a person could be elected President of the United States against his will.)

There are so many aspects of this story that warrant more attention than history has given them.  But perhaps most painful to read about was the blind insistence on the part of the doctors that they were helping Garfield when, in fact, they were doing everything imaginable to make him worse. 

It's easy for us to sit on this side of history and scoff at the absurdity of the medical community not “believing” in germs.  But I don’t think the specifics here are the lesson.  I think that whether it’s germs, or ancient scientists refusing to accept that the earth moves around the sun, or even Hostess Brands refusing to acknowledge that relying solely on comically unhealthy junk food isn’t the best business model in the 21st century, there is a common theme in which we prove ourselves to be a species that stubbornly fights against change.

Knowing for a fact that there are many ways in which I could do better with that myself, I probably don’t have a lot of room to judge my predecessors for something that I happen to be guilty of too.

Picture from the National Museum of Health and Medicine, pilfered here via the New York Times.

It often seems arbitrary what changes time brings (a Secret Service department, hand sanitizer) and what it leaves alone (we never did get that allowing-lunatics-to-buy-guns thing straightened out).  But if time can be relied on for anything, it's to keep moving.  There was a part near the end of the book where, in thinking about the impact Garfield would have on history, contemporaries of his came to the grim (though accurate) conclusion that he would be forgotten.  There was no lasting triumph or single devastating blow to make his life, or death, all that memorable.

Apparently you can be President of the United States, get killed, send a nation into turmoil, and a couple of generations later, vanish from public consciousness.

Talk about a reality check for our self-absorbed times.

And SCENE!

The low point came at Mile 12, when I felt bad in a way that I’ve never felt bad before, which scared the living daylights out of me.  But I took a walk break and the feeling passed – and along with it went all the feelings of anxiety and pressure that naturally crop up when it’s finally that one day you’ve spent the past six months of your life working up to.

There I was, twelve miles down and fourteen-plus yet to go; clearly not in a position to run a better time than last year (what with walking that early in the game); but with no limits, restrictions, or obligations either.  All I had to do, the only thing I had to get done the entire rest of the day, was get through those fourteen miles.  That’s it.  And I asked myself if I was going to do it, or if I was going to fucking do it.

Thus began the most fun fourteen miles I’ve ever run in my life.  

I wound up besting my previous time in spite of myself, and went the whole 26.2 without any real pain (unquestionably a first for me).  And I was smiling at the end.  So my second marathon this past Saturday was successful by every standard I had set for myself and then some.  I’m so happy that I did it – that I gave myself the opportunity to do it.

And now I’m likewise happy that it’s OVER.

It’s been my line all week that it’s a good test of my self-discipline to train for one marathon a year, and an equally good test of my sanity to be able to take a step back when it’s over.

A lot of energy went into training for this.  It’s time for me to rechannel some of that toward other things for a while.  No more forty-mile weeks for me…

…or at least not until this time next year… :)

Mile 7, courtesy of Breakaway Running.  This is the only shot of me from last Saturday to show up so far; I know there are many others out there, but I can't imagine any will capture the day better than this.