p runs seattle

Winter Marathoning

2011-12-03T09:35:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I ran the Seattle Marathon on the first Sunday of Advent. And had I thought about it, it would have given me a clue. I certainly spent the day in longing.

Something about the trails this summer and fall has majorly shifted my mental. I keep inadvertently searching out ways to run that are, for me, more free and true. I love the push of a 5k, but that thrust exists within a box of expectations and there is little room to deviate from those expectations without disappointment-- and, because your head can be just that crazy, despair-- It does feel great. I caught the running bug in college when I PRed every weekend. It was the greatest feeling to know I could break those mental (and definitely physical as well) barriers. And admittedly, if I were a better athlete, more sleekly built or just faster, I would probably have stuck with it. The worry, the doubt, the extremely hard work, the intensity of an effort and the gratification of reaching a pace goal.

but somewhere along the line I got a distance bug as well. I wanted to go farther than I could imagine and I began to think about a marathon. My first marathon taught me that- for me- 26 miles is far too long to be in a pace box. So many do it, and I am truly amazed by them. They start with a goal, a focus and a mantra. They know how they'll feel and approximately what time they'll reach each leg of the race. And while I'm sure I could do this, it would take an enormous amount of time and effort and more than one transformation. At first, I think maybe I thought I would. But then I stumbled upon trails, and I'll never forget that first run.

There was over a foot of snow as soon as I turned up the path. 14 minutes later, we moved from the snowy road to the snow-laden single track trails up the mountain. On the path a spray-painted number 1 glistened on the snow. 1 mile down in over 14 minutes. And that's when the box shattered. I laughed, I slipped, I forgot about my pace, and all those expectations lay lifeless and powdered in the snow, dissolved by the raw joy churning through my bloodstream. The snow, the striking evergreens framing the horizon, the twisting uphill, our pink faces, clouds of breath exhaled all around us, huge grins on everyone's face. Is this for real? I remember thinking. Are we really going to try and finish this thing? And three hours later, I finished the slowest half marathon I've ever run. And I was hooked.

On August 6, five months and three trail races later (a 10, a 13, and a 20) I found myself at Grand Ridge attempting my first 50k. By now there were faces I recognized at the start with me, and I was offered advice and encouragement. I had two liters of water slung on my back, a ton of food stuffed in my pack, and not an ounce of panic (something that has plagued me since the first marathon) in my system. I truly just enjoyed the day. The course was set up as two half marathons out-and-backs and a five mile loop at the end. Unfortunately, each one of these legs begins with a monstrous climb. The first one was tough, but I finished in 3:05. I chatted with a friend, found a bathroom, ate and drank and then started up the mountain again. The second way out was lonely and extremely difficult. I walked a lot. On the way back I was mentally and physically bankrupt I slowed to a crawl. I crashed without the right sort of food and was afraid to eat more, but desperately needed it. Alone for hours at a time, I started seeing things in the trees. When I finished the marathon course at 7:44 (second half mar had taken me over 4:30!) I called it a day, and had no regrets. I had gone as long as I could.

The following week in an explanation of why I called it quits, I told my boss that after 20 miles I had started seeing figures running along side me in the trees. She grinned mysteriously and answered: How lucky for you that you could finally see them after all that time. :D

Two months later, Patrick and I drove four hours to Chelan so I could try it again. I won't go into it here, this post is already long enough... but I ate over 700 cal, I never panicked; I even pushed, I had the time of my life. The course was breath-taking, and when those swimming figures began to emerge from the trees once fatigue set in, I grinned and thought about what my boss had said. So many things you can't have at just any moment, but can only experience in the long, long run. How lucky.
Then I finished in 7:04, all 31 miles. And all this with only cross-training. (see last post)

So the marathon. I had forgotten what it feels like to shuffle for so long, using more or less the same motion the entire time and landing again and again- hard- on your heels. But now I remember. I remember the mental anguish, the panic (my throat closed this time at mile 24- how cruel), the demoralizing notion of pace. I think marathons are wonderful, and I think everyone should try and run them if that is what you want, but on that cold, sunny morning (if your luck is better than mine that is!) you won't see me at that particular start line. Minutes after I finished on Sunday I was on the phone with Patrick. What happened? he asked. It just felt less adventurous and more like a hamster wheel, I answered, in tears. And that's the best way I know how to put it even now.

I could tell you about and show you diagrams of the muscle groups you use when you change your pace and direction, and the ones you use on flat pavement; or tell you about joint health and the perfect stride. I could bring in a picture of the views of the marathon and contrast them with those of Lake Chelan, or try and convince you all just to try it. But, I won't. For now I simply will take all these things I have had the luck to learn and try to make the best of them. There is a lesson in the good race, there is virtue in the races that crush you to a pulp, but you finish anyway. And there is hope in what is to come this year.

Which brings us full circle. Happy Advent, and Happy birthday to my amazing sister, Erin. :)

DTR with Running

2011-10-25T19:27:00.000-07:00

Tonight was just like the memory of so many others. Something-- a sentence fragment, an exhaled breath of air, the picture on the cover of a book-- inspired me to sink into my Asics and hit the road. Its nighttime in October, and cold, though the air still seems full with the memory of late afternoon sun. My breath comes out in little puffs as I open up past the campus and inhale deeply. It feels unspeakably good to be back here, in these first few blocks before the twinge in my left hip, the tightness in my calf, and weird strain on my foot all make themselves heard. But I soak it all in. The familiarity of this rhythm is like turning on the radio to an old favorite. Feet hitting the ground, breathing cold air, arms at my sides, swinging slightly. I think I could do this forever, but then the traffic light changes.

I cross the street and head to the track, jog a few laps and then time myself for several 400 meter laps. I haven't worn this many clothes exercising for months, haven't strayed out of doors in this weather and looking around at the many other runners on the track, I see I have been missing out. Its cool, but alive outside tonight. There's more electricity on this track right now than in my living room, though it whirs with the burden of our lights, refrigerator, and new 30-gallon fish tank. This is where I want to be.

So where have I been? Well.

After Lord Hill I knew I needed something, needed a push, a spark. Mileage is great- no- essential, but strength training is fundamental, and something I've somehow managed to fall behind on in the past. We definitely had our share of it in college, but the truth is, if you don't really want to do it, you probably won't. I did, in a sense, want to get the rotation in, but it didn't mean a lot to me. So many exciting things were happening on the road and track, why build biceps afterwards in the gym? So of course, I took short-cuts, I skipped parts I couldn't do (yet), I forgot to maybe do it twice a week. And the end of that story is that somehow I got through 25 years of my life without ever doing a pushup. Many adults don't require this sort of skill to get through the hum-drum of life. Pay bills, do the dishes, eat and sleep. But I knew I wanted something particular: to climb mountains. So.

By luck and a little bit of effort I found INSANITY, an appropriately (though possibly offensive) named workout series designed to be the 'most difficult workout series ever put on DVD.' I'm not usually one for workout videos, but several points appealed to me.

1. It's a 60 day program. Obvious goal, obvious end point (or so I thought...)
2. It's really, really hard. Definitely would challenge me, not a waste of my time.
3. It does not require any weights or equipment. Like running, it's simple, just me and the space and my own mind.

So just a few days after my first attempted 50k (of which I ran only 26 miles in 7 hours and 42 minutes-- totally brutal climb) a little shoebox arrived in the mail and the fun began.

The first day was a fit test, just to see where you're at, nothing too crazy. I almost threw up. The second day was a 40 minute workout that almost destroyed my entire body. I often do this workout now and cannot believe that this was what I did on the first day. It still leaves me on the floor, positively dripping with the sweat. And it only gets tougher from there. After the first month, you exchange the 4 workouts you've been rotating for 4 more, and what you thought was the max becomes just the beginning. The second month literally made me cry more than once. The workouts stretch out to about an hour and the moves get more technical and complicated. There is still one or two that I haven't figured out how to do yet. But many, many heart-breakingly early mornings later, I finished. I did the whole 60 days.

A week before I finished the program, I ran another 50k. I hadn't run much in the meantime, during the weeks of INSANITY-- a couple 3-6 milers on the weekends (you get Sunday off), and a half-marathon in the middle-- so I wasn't sure what to expect. Do jumps and push-ups and floor sprints really prepare you for mountain running for 7-8 hours? I suppose I can't be sure. But here are the facts: On Aug 6 I ran a 7h 42m trail marathon. On Oct 1 I ran a 7h 4m 50k. That's 5 miles more in almost 40 minutes less, so... I think I'll stick with it!

I was so pleased after the 50k, that I actually let someone talk me into considering a 50 miler this spring. Considering, anyway.

So my goal for this round of INSANITY? Run in the evenings a couple times a week. I have really enjoyed the workouts, pushing and breathing hard, and beating the mental barrier are all things I love. But running is what its all for, and I haven't lost sight of that. In the first few days of INSANITY, hobbling to work and cringing when I had to squat or sit, I couldn't imagine running, but I'm ready now.

Marathon on the 24th of November, about a month away! Then I'm in for a tough winter, and maybe another marathon in April. The 50 miler is in May. Stay tuned, we'll see just how crazy I get...

Lord Hill 20 Miler

2011-07-03T08:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I ran the Lord Hill 20 mile trail run (check it out here)and it was the most educational run I've gone on in a while. Going into it I had mixed emotions (all of which I explained in great depth to pat the whole way there. Thanks, dude:)), the first of which was a lot of worry. The fact is, I have been running more or less every day for the past three weeks (is that all?!) and working out at least twice a week (a puny 15-minute routine of the mainline runner stuff), but nothing more than 6 miles- maybe 7, but a short 7 and usually a tired 7 that left me irritated the next day. I haven't even taken my confidence-building 10 mile joy run that I usually turn to in preparation for things like this. I've just had a lot of other things on my mind. And then suddenly the race was here. I took Thursday and Friday off because I was sore from Wednesday's 20 minute shuffle through my neighborhood. It did not look good.

And this all is very telling for me. I do need a lot of long run prep for longer races; I just do. But I have always suspected that the preparation was 40% physical and 60% mental. When the gun goes off (or the man hollers "GO!")and I start to panic my brain needs to know empirically that I can do what I have set out to do. Empirical data has been my MO for staving off panic for years and years in a plethora of situations. It's funny when I really consider it and think about me as a person and how I tend to behave in most situations...

but everyone has a place they go in panic and its not always something they're proud of. For me, the place I go is called 'frantically searching for hard proof that one can restabilize.' And running seems to be the only sure-fire way of encountering this sort of panic. I suppose it thankfully doesn't happen too often in my life and usually if it does, I can quickly disengage from whatever has brought it on. But races aren't like that. Somehow the thunder of footfalls, the upward twisting of the path, the warmth of the sun and my own gasping lungs transplant me to that prehistoric time when running meant survival. And here my own evolutionary code locks me in my place in the middle of the pack, and there's no turning back.

THE RACE- ONLY THE BEGINNING
Yesterday was no exception. It didn't help that the first 2 miles of the course were the worst, but before we'd even gotten into the woods, I was bottoming out. Why did I think I would be able to do this? I haven't been training, I haven't run this intense of hills (even the ones in Queen Anne just don't compare). The sun was already warm,I hadn't hydrated properly or eaten much. And I'll just be honest with you- I started my period on the way to the woods that day so those horrible stomach pains hadn't just been anxiety; they were here to stay. No one would blame me for dropping out. The the animal instincts kept me locked to the trail for a few more moments, but I felt bulky and strange, unused to running. My legs were already full of lead, and I was hardly able to catch my breath. Every time I heard the words '18 more!' in my head the panic was so huge I almost started to cry, my breath became so ragged that I thought maybe my old friend panic attack was back and my throat got tighter at the thought. Then we turned into the woods. This is where you relax, I told myself. This is where you find your peace.

And the woods were beautiful, and calm and the hills rolled out beneath me, little climb, little descent. I looked straight ahead and hung on.

MILE FOUR
And then a miracle happened. Though there were about 200 runners, the first brutal climbs had spread us so thinly that I was already mostly alone. There was the occasional flicker of color through the trees or the sound of crunching behind me, but mostly just the sound of my own breathing. Out of nowhere a woman came up beside me. We commented on the brutal hills, I asked her if she'd run with Evergreen before. No. Well, they don't mind throwing them atcha. We talked about races we'd run before. She's done a handful of marathons and even a few 50ks. Today she was running the 20 just like me. The light became beautiful through the trees and we pitter-pattered along, scrambling up single track hills, enjoying the wider fire roads. We talked about shoes, the state of washington, the stinging nettles on the trail. Then we hit the aid station. It had only been 53 minutes and here we were at mile 5! (I actually think the first aid station is about 4.5 miles in, but still) Could I do this three more times? I asked myself. And the answer was emphatically yes. The trail was beautiful and I was flushed with... not competence or even relief from panic, but just the happiness of being out there, of doing that animal thing: running through the woods, and doing that human thing, too: meaning.

MILE 7.3
And this is only possible because my running friend (I never learned her name) had one of those fancy watches that tells you how far along you are. Looking at my watch (which was counting minutes for me, but nothing more) I thought we might be nearing the ten mile mark. The course was set up as two ten mile loops which meant that when you finished the first loop you were right where you had started but also right where you would eventually finish. I wasn't looking forward to the temptation to pack it up and get out of there, but at the moment I felt hopeful. Anyway, I asked her if she thought we were almost there, and she told me we'd run only just over seven miles. This was a very helpful piece of information. I did not, therefore, spend the next three miles exhaustedly searching for the parking lot. I knew I wasn't going to see it any time soon. And I felt fine about it.

MILE 10
[side note: Patrick ran the 5 mile course. When we got there and he saw how pretty it was, and realized how long he would be waiting for me, he signed up. Dressed only in a jeans and t-shirt, he was determined to do it anyway, but a nice man took pity on him and gave him an extra pair of shorts. So sweet. It took him somewhere between an hour and 1:15 to finish and guess what? he got all of those brutal climbs in the beginning. Poor guy is sunburned and unhappy now, but I think pretty proud of himself also.]

So when I came down the hill to the parking lot there he was, in a billowing pair of shorts and looking awful. Kristin, I feel like shit! was his greeting and I hugged him hello. Good job! I said and rushed over to get a drink of water. Sadly my running partner decided to call it a day since her boyfriend and friend had already finished and were waiting. I told her that I couldn't have done it without her, and it was true. But another thing: I was not even remotely tempted to end my race here. I actually felt pretty fabulous. Pat had collapsed; I couldn't find him to say goodbye and start my trek back up into the woods alone, but I didn't mind. I set off. I had rolled in about 2:12 but with the bathroom and eating, it was about 2:20 when I left.

MILES 10-15
Here were the same climbs, the tiny paths twisting endlessly upward, and yeah, I walked most of the uphills the second time around, but I was totally transformed. HERE is where I relaxed. Every sense was glowing with peace. It might have helped enormously that Pride and Prejudice began playing on my iPod. Sweet minimal piano music that seems set to trees and flowers. I ran when I got to the woods, aware the my body was much weaker, but that feeling- that sort of broken feeling was gentle, even luxurious as I allowed myself to look up, around and just enjoy the scenery. Being alone was a luxury- being alone and not panicked was even better. This is what I love about running: how it totally breaks your heart and leaves you with compassion for yourself and the whole world. The kindness it allows you to inhabit.

MILES 15-19
Here is where I met the beast. After the aid station I felt pretty good. Mentally I knew I was nearing the end, but the trail was still pretty strenuous. It was amazing the loops I had glossed over chattering with a friend that totally exhausted me now. I followed a creek bed straight up for about a mile and a half and said to myself 'Okay, yeah, I probably shouldn't have done this race. I'm done and I can't really do any more.' At that point I looked down at my watch- it had been 4 hours exactly. And I laughed. Behind all that panic, I had four hours of running in my lungs and bones before I really felt done. And behind that I apparently had another hour of pushing some more. And this point the trail dipped down onto a fire road and I passed a lot of hikers. I rocked out to Regina Spektor on my headphones, a little Patty Griffen and before I knew it, I came upon the meadow where we started. I had about a mile left to go.

MILE 20
It was peaceful walking up the rolling hills, pattering down, shuffling along and watching every step carefully- I was very light-headed and prone to tripping. I was also extremely thirsty. Then suddenly ahead of me there was a man. He had hiking poles and got them out for every uphill, then picked them up and slung them in his pack for the downs. He looked totally cool, totally hydrated, like he could do this all day. I caught up with him. Are you done? I asked. No, he replied, I've got another loop. This didn't seem to bother him. You? Done, I said. Congratulations, he said so warmly that I almost choked up. I was feeling very, very relieved. He gave me some advice on running longer distances in the heat, I told him he looked very cool for having such a long way to go. Honestly,he said, I feel great, I'm just relaxed. I might go around two more times.

We ran in together chattering about the course and crossed the tape without a fuss. There were the remnants of the Evergreen support people offering us chips, watermelon, bagels and burgers all on reusable plates. Are you done? they asked me. Yes, I told them, and looked at my watch: 5:08:56. Just 56 seconds longer than my worst marathon time. Also 56 seconds longer than I've ever been out there before. But I've literally never felt happier after a run.

To sum up, the things I learned:
1. I can actually run 4 hours, so relax!
2. salt tablets are a must on warm days
3. a little chit-chat can go a long way

I recommend Evergreen to anyone. They are a great group of people who really care about their sport.

A discovery

2011-07-01T14:43:00.000-07:00

So today while looking everywhere for our second set of car keys I made a discovery. This is one of those findings that is so embarrassing that you don't tell anyone, but at the same time, too interesting and just kind of amazing to- at the moment- keep to myself. I'll just get right down to it: anyway, here I sit on the cushion-less ledge of my garage sale la-z-boy couch while beside me sits the mound of things I found here. Essentially every night when we snuggle up to watch TV, here the are things we have unwittingly been snuggling with:

headphones
a sock
four pens
four pencils
innumerable crumbs (including one almost whole chip and the cliched piece of popcorn)
a wine cork
a plastic sign cover (one guess where that's from)
an actual large pair of scissors
$1.66 in change, $1.50 of which were quarters! (and to think, the number of times I've searched frantically for bus fare!!)

This will never happen again, I swear it to myself.

This weekend

2011-06-29T19:01:00.000-07:00

Lord Hill 20 miler this weekend! Report to come.

Jumping the Log

2011-06-03T06:50:00.000-07:00

Disinclined as I am to leave intellectual offerings of belief at the feet of any God, I am spangled with irrational superstitions that patch together the hastily-sewn fabric of my inner intuitive mind, a tie-dye of overlapping, nonsensical faith. If it rains today, then it won't tomorrow. If I roll the dice again I'll see what I would have gotten. If I concentrate enough, the traffic light will change when I come to it; or one better: If I let my intuition pick the route, the traffic will be all in my favor. Yeah, okay, I never speak them aloud, (and thank goodness I now realize) but they are real to me. They function; they are a tint in the glasses I wear.

So it seemed right and fair this week that it rained, that inconsistent, shifty sort of smattering that chills you, making you feel that you are being punished. My co-teacher must have felt the same way I do because on Wednesday at lunch she told the children:

"My dear friends (the first three words are sung, a little tune that I hum to myself all day long), not today, not tomorrow, but the next day we won't come to school, instead we'll go to the park. And our owls, the 5-year-olds will be jumping the log for kindergarten. Now I've been talking to the rain fairies, and the sun fairies and telling them: 'you may rain today, you may rain tomorrow, but please, please, please sun fairies, we want to be with you all day on Friday so that our children may play in the dry green grass with their mommies and daddies or two mommies or two daddies and feel the warm sun on their faces all day long.'"

So of course this morning I woke up to cloudless skies (an almost impossibility in this city!) and trees green with the wash of sun. Did you know that everything, everything looks different in the sun? Sensitive as I have become to light, I've learned to start, actually gasp at the sight of a shadow or a dappled leaf. And then I turn and search for the source, wary of trickery and like my life depended on it, like a strange-but-not-total inverse of the poor soul who sees that little red dot of light that means a sniper is trained to its target. Ah, the sun. An altogether more benevolent source.

And jumping the log. It seems to me a brilliant stroke of ingenuity that in a school where the basic course goals are putting on your own shoes and rain pants, climbing up nets and trees, stacking wood and tying ropes tight enough to swing from, the mark of world-readiness is not reciting the alphabet, not even singing in Spanish (the latter of which we will do today), but jumping over a hunk of felled tree. This is Waldorf; this is what I've learned. It's all about learning to be in your body, finally after all this time of holding onto heaven.

Being in your body means you've done just what we've tried to teach you. You have two strong feet on the ground, you can greet the dear earth, you can greet the sun; the stones which rest, the plants which grow, the beasts which run, you can greet your neighbor in all I say and do and you and I on earth are one. And if you can do all those things, you can jump high if you want to.

And oh, you do, because when you do, just today, you will receive a golden key from one of your teachers, and you won't know what it opens until you grow up, and then you'll see. It opens everything.

So today I greet the light myself with a buoyant heart, shaking my head at the myself all the same, but happy to be here at the end of the school year, with dear friends and the sun, no matter what the fairies had to do with it.

Grand Ridge 10 Mile

2011-06-02T06:48:00.000-07:00

Well, here's the latest in relentless participation. I ran the Grand Ridge 10 mile last night, the easiest of the trail races to come and I definitely learned some lessons.

1. while I can possibly not train for a 10 mile road race, the same is not true on a mountain.
2. trail running is really, really, really, really hard.
3. find out which leaves are poisonous.
4. or pee ahead of time.

wooooooooo, here we go. Already signed up for the 20miler in July. Perhaps the family reunion will power me through. I leave a week from yesterday!

Relentless Participation- responding to blessings

2011-05-30T12:53:00.000-07:00

'... people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.
...
The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people."

I found this passage in a novel that shall remain nameless since there's a good chance you would judge my reading choice... it wasn't a book I planned on reading, but as I did (by a set of circumstances that eventually led me this over-hyped tale)I found several gems that were- though not overly poetic- well worth considering, and here's the one that's been on my mind over the last few days. 'You must participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your blessings.' Its been clunking around in my head since I read it and something tells me I needed to hear it.

What is it about post-collegiate life? I was just so used to succeeding- not succeeding; for sure, my grades were just a notch above the average. I passed most classes with As, not A+'s, and I don't even remember my GPA anymore. But there was a success all the same. I was- how do I say it?- liked. I didn't have to dole out any special effort to communicate to the world that I cared. My professors wanted to hear what I said, looked forward to reading my papers, let me stay after class to pepper them with questions and scooted me out hours later with grins on their faces. It's not that I was the smartest, but everywhere I went they said generally the same thing: It's clear to us how much you care. And there you had it. I was not the best, but I cared a lot, perhaps more than most. And it sailed me through most difficulties. Most things that were weaknesses (preparations, unbiased research, mile splits in XC) were forgiven because I cared.

Then I moved to Seattle. Now let me be clear, this is the west coast and all; everything you've heard about passive-aggression, cynicism, and snobbery are, in many respects, true. But it wasn't just that. I will never forget arriving at my first review in the grocery store. I walked into the back room with a bounce in my step because- well- I associate feedback with affirmation. I've never before known what it was like to be so hugely misunderstood. It was a small strike in my ego, then, to hear that I had a bit to work on, that I came off as negative at times (me?! how?!?!), that they wished I was quicker. But I care so much! I thought desperately. (In my defense, when I was hired I was told it would not matter how quickly I could get through my routine; what counted was my attitude and customer service. This never, never was repeated to me again-- but that's another story, and an old, dead one at that...)

And perhaps because I associated much of my negative experience at the grocery store with being misunderstood and (in my opinion) mistreated, the lesson I should have learned slipped through the cracks of my frustration, entitlement, etc: that being 'likeable' and caring a lot will not always allow me to avoid my short-comings. But then I started work at the preschool. It is, in almost every way, a different job than the store, but only a year into it (sooner, actually, though I didn't realize it at the time), I was told the same thing. Sometimes they wished I was, well, you know, a bit quicker in the kitchen. I was shattered. No way, man, this is my job, this is _my_ job, the one that found me, the one where I- just as I am- fit perfectly. How could this horrible accusation follow me? A bit of turmoil followed in which I applied for a morning position, was told I didn't have what it would take and spent the subsequent days in a puddle of self-pity and despair. How, why, and what next? But after a little soul-searching I realized my problem- I noticed that I was raised to love myself (a huge blessing!), that I have friends and family who thing I'm great (an equally wonderful realization), and that I was lucky or blessed enough again to be appreciated academically, especially within my soul-searching major. But.

These luxuries in some way have left me unprepared (or rather my own interaction in these luxuries) for the fact that life is work. I don't pretend that I have a difficult life and that the blessings that make up my daily/weekly/monthly/yearly routine require my constant diligence (as they might for so many, I am sad and embarrassed to say). Rather, it is the very richness of these blessings that make it so important and so difficult for me to remember that blessings without careful, creative, and industrious response are just good luck. Life will just happen to me if I let it, and unremarkable time may pass. 24 hour days don't need my excellent participation, my astounding creativity, my humble greatness of soul, my exotic kindness to all beings in order to come and go. I am ashamed and humbled to realize that when this job happened to me (and despite all my hard work and countless resumes, it truly did just _happen_), I thought it was fate, and that, well, karma or God or the Great Benevolence of the Universe had brought it to my feet, that somehow I deserved this break without much effort on my part. I thought if I just showed up every day, it would come together beautifully. It is worth saying that I may have had a similar idea about marriage. I mean, maybe not, but probably.

Anyway, after that long puddle-of-self-pity week I got up (because I had to) and went to work on Monday morning. I went to the library and found books on the job I wanted to do, I went to the hardware store and bought tools, and because I enjoy what I do immensely, I was blessed enough to work from joyfulness every day. About six days later, they called and said I had turned a page and could have the job, if I wanted it.

When I came across this passage in my book, I was shamed and in love at once. Yes. You must participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your blessings. You may notice that I used that word a lot in these paragraphs: blessing. And its one I don't toss around. But its high time that I look at the stuff that makes up my life and acknowledge how lovely it is. Surely there is a lot I would love to change, many things I dislike, so much I struggle with, can't wait to see improve-- but next to the friends, family, coworkers (not to mention small things like an apartment and money to buy food)the complaints grow small and feeble, paled by the glow of blessings. But acknowledging them, throwing out my hasty gratefulness doesn't seem enough. Showing up doesn't cut it anymore. I must 'fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it...' So I'm going to roll up my sleeves.

In other news, Kyrianne started to crawl last weekend. Oh, the things we can learn from the tenacity of infants. The insistence on growing stronger every day, their mighty participation.

For Mother's Day :)

2011-05-08T16:22:00.001-07:00

Race schedule spring to winter 2011:

April 23rd: Squak Mountain half marathon
June 1: Grand Solstice 10 mile trail run
July 2: Lord Hill 20 mile trail run
Aug 6: Grand Ridge 50k
Sept 10: Dash Point 10k
Oct 23: Ft. Steilacoom half marathon
November 27: Seattle Marathon
January 8: Bridle Trails 10 mile trail festival
March 6: ???

Why I love trail running: this whole thing costs ~$260! (Including the 70 dollar road marathon)

And of course not counting the last one. Much remains to be seen, the wheels are turning.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom. I love you!
-P

January

2011-01-22T23:35:00.000-08:00

feeling so bleak since its January, and though, yes, almost over, I'm glad to write one small thing from within the tall, damp walls of this uncomfortably chilly month.

It's impossible to catch your breath, to feel warm, to get enough hot liquid down your throat. Sure, I'm no longer an inhabitant of sub-zero Chicagoland, but the clinging wet of coastal winters clings and sops inside and out leaving everything saturated, without the possibility of consolation. To run is one's only hope.

I took a second shift at another school (same director, but for babies) over Christmas break and I knew the extra work meant running was going to shift in my life. It would be in or out. I have been slowly backing off, letting it get pushed to the last place- like vacuuming or reading books on philosophy. When I get time. You know, so I basically quit except for 3/4 times a week, a three mile guilt run. So I chose to make it work, to turn over a new leaf, and on T/Th I attept to run to Greenlake (now a 3.5 mile jaunt as opposed to the twelve minutes from my old neighborhood)with my gear slung over my shoulders, change, work four hours, the change back and run to Fremont for the last five hour stint. I think I've only made it work one day a week so far. And this morning after running one of my worst two-milers yet (no. 4 in a 6 race series) I decided something had to change. First stop was to joy run 6 and a half this evening, and now I'm going to try and look for a coach. I'm 25; I have the best years ahead of me apparently. And a half this march, a full in april and a 50k in August. That is, if it doesn't conflict with my big sister's wedding which obviously, beats the hell out of anything else. There's going to be a feast and dancing (cross your fingers) and so much joy. We're already all full to the brim with it. As they say, Tic Tac Toe.

Work is... triumphant. I sometimes look up and see that two hours has gone by, and reflecting on my old life, know that two hours might have passed much quicker at a register, numbly scooping groceries across a scanner and into bags, pleasantly chatting on the good days, exchanging the niceties every time else. And yet, all that I've been preoccupied with: the passing of time as a gift instead of a countdown is possible here. At school time doesn't pass quickly; it passes _well_. We are taught to move slowly, to excude satisfaction in our work, to savor our sewing projects and hum while we roll yarn into balls. In the yards we take donated Christmas trees and tie them with ropes to wet, gnarled branches to make forts. We scrub the porches, haul logs and feed the animals. I walk in thinking, 'hope this goes quickly today' and then step into a world of rhythms in which I am invited to take part. It is the liturgy of the home and of the classroom and I don't need to leave- what is there to run to?

This is not to say that I am never dying to rush around the corner and get a coffee or that I haven't (from time to time) wanted to lock a child out of the house. But generally I couldn't be happier. My co-workers are dear and there's always something to learn.

Kyrianne is almost seven months old- which means that we are only days away from being out of the six month woods. Have to say, I'm quite relieved to have made it this far.

Love this

2010-10-18T23:53:00.000-07:00

I am a Hindu because of sculptured cones of red kumkum powder and baskets of yellow turmeric nuggets, because of garlands of flowers and pieces of broken coconut, because of the clanging of bells to announce one's arrival to God, because of the whine of the reedy nadaswaram and the beating of drums, because of the patter of bare feet against the stone floors down dark corridors pierced by shafts of sunlight, because of the fragrance of incense, because of the flames of arati lamps circling in the darkness, because of bhajans being sweetly sung, because of elephants standing around to bless, because of colourful murals telling colourful stories, because of foreheads carying, variously signified, the same word-- faith.

I became loyal to these sense impressions before I knew what they meant or what they were for. It is my heart that commands me so. I feel at home in a Hindu temple. ... Truly I am in a sacred cosmic womb, a place where everything is born, and it is my sweet luck to behold its living core.

-Life of Pi, p47-8

A year

2010-10-09T12:05:00.000-07:00

Every year the sun tucks in behind a cloud; every year the wet winter draws curtains closed and night time closer; every year I am surprised: Is it really already August... Septe-- October? This time last year I was parading Erin around the streets of Seattle, carving pumpkins and making pie. I lived on the crowded, rowdy streets of the U-district, said hello to the folks selling Real Change at the Safeway, made my way to banks and coffee shops and the Post Office, all mercifully within walking distance, all tucked in the space between Greenlake and Lake Union, north of the bridge, south of the suburbs, right off campus where the parties never end and the stores don't bother to open their doors until 10 AM. Last year I worried about walking the Ave passed 10pm and ran the four blocks to work at 5AM half because I was late, and half to avoid trouble. I tip toed by the door way where a homeless man snored. I pounded my way through the neighborhood, around the university and ran in their community races. And this year.

I can't get over all the changes taking place. My neighborhood is quiet and woody, sweet with neighbors who know my name and stop by with offers of produce. The closest grocery store is a twenty minute walk away, and though they care about local produce and ethical companies, charge five bucks for a box of cereal. Patrick makes an... altogether different roommate. I work a day job. I spend long Saturdays doing chores, and planning for Sunday school. At night I write grocery lists and if its a good one, we walk to 7-11 to buy beer before we watch Lost on Pat's computer. Or read John Irving under the lamp Christy left us when she moved to England.

Christy moved to England one week ago yesterday. This is perhaps the biggest change of all. The little pieces of her that are missing surface all the time. Sometimes I want to send her a text. I see a movie, a book, or smell the coffee in the U-district, as I did last night, there again for the first time in a while-- I touched the lamp post on 11th, one I used to run by every day, that I have clung to at the end of a 20-mile run just to feel something solid and cool. Oh, Christy. This is our Seattle. The skyline at night from Capitol Hill. The morning kayak-ers under University bridge. It all meant that we were together and on our own. Now just on our own-- but I am excited for her too- I picture her drinking wine and reading a novel in a cozy, crowded pub, or walking in the rain.

So, it is October again- this is the month where the preschool looks normal to me. Where the days consist of rainy boots and 30 pairs of rain pants and hot tea and buns baking shaped by children with miniature rolling pins and aprons. Where the outdoors require long johns and wild imaginations. And this time last year I was beginning to form the plans that would end in a freezing cold night on Fremont bridge (over while I commute daily this year) and a ring on my finger.

Speaking of that.

from this day forward

2010-09-20T07:47:00.001-07:00

Ever since that day- the last day of July- my head has been full of vows. And it never really hit me, though I had typed them out line by line on this same computer just how serious they are. 'Sure,' I had thought while scanning them for offensive misrepresentations of our relationship or our faith, 'these seem appropriate.' Fitting. The same old words I've heard a million times before. Yet the shock I felt upon hearing Dr. Hartley request those words of me on that day- It's worth saying that I never thought I'd really be standing in that place.

Getting engaged in the first place is an exercise in drawing attention to yourself. And no, you really DON'T have to do it, and that's what takes so much practice if you decide marriage is something you want. Many unwed couples have respectable, beautifully interwoven lives together. Furthermore, many wed couples spend less time and hooplah that we did. Yes, we actually want you to spend money on a plane ticket. Yes, we actually want you to buy an outfit, drive for hours, do your make-up, watch us say some ridiculous vows that are- let's face it- mere words, words we could say to each other in our living room and then email you about later. To admit you want to go through with it can actually be somewhat embarrassing, and you walk around in an apologetic posture for weeks before you learn to take yourself seriously. But the bottom line is: we believe in community, and in public vows and it is something we wanted. Marriage, the wedding (you know, within reason), the whole enchilada.

And so I was beginning to get used to the fact that when the photographer barked, "And everyone now move in around the bride," he was actually talking about me. I didn't really do the whole hide-from-the-guests thing and as I've mentioned, Patrick and I had already seen each other, so one of my favorite parts of the day was easily greeting friends who came in while we were taking pictures or while I was rushing around the sanctuary, clutching my massive train in my left hand and talking a mile a minute. I had seen their names on paper, but it was wonderful to see my dear friends file in and the family I had only seen for a minute or two the night before.

Moments before the ceremony I think it hit me for one of the first times what was actually going on- not just the festivity, but he MARRIAGE and when Erin said- here we go, you and Pat are going to get married now, all I could do was whisper loudly, 'Holy Fuck!' which at least won the favor of Pat's best friend Josh.

In the end, it is a beautiful thing to say vows while people are watching. It creates witness for the words you do exchange in your living room. Sure you're nice when you're wearing white, but later, a month later when the money is scant and the lights are left on all night? But we said those vows, those things and everyone knows it, and it would be to dishonor their presence for us to give in so quickly to impatience, bitterness, despair.

So thank god for the vows, for the witness, for the hooplah. It is now not only sweet, but prudent (financially if nothing else) to make some attempt to remember them.

Oh, the places

2010-09-14T10:47:00.001-07:00

My brain:

1. pasta and sauce to make for the preschoolers today, and Jennifer, Julia and I are determined to make lunch a calm affair. The fragrance of new wood chips in the backyard, an afternoon with little p.

2. Laura and Jeremy's lovely wedding last weekend, and the spectacular reception.

3. Jonathan Safran Foer coming to town hall on the 20th!

4. the half-marathon in Euguene, visits to portland.

5. Kyrianne's baptism- November

6. visiting an old friend tonight- cleaning my house and finally getting everything organized

7. letters from a VERY old, very young friend in distress-- and yet the day-today is overwhelmingly beautiful...

and all of this last week has reminded me how much I want to write and remember the wedding which means something new to me every day- especially this tricky puzzle called actually being married, how it feels like trying to see the world through a kaleidoscope- all those constantly changing and bleeding colors of authority, rightness, fairness, intimacy, determination, and destiny...

Meanwhile, reading Peter Singer and John Irving and running on a hip that's ruined from miles and dancing the night away...

Part III

2010-08-23T07:15:00.000-07:00

I have just woken up from what has been my third wedding dream. Everyone told me I would dream crazy things in the weeks leading up to the big day, but much to my disappointment, I didn't see so much as a sugarplum. I happen to be a lucid dreamer; I dream in spy movies and apocalyptic events- I couldn't wait for the big show! But the wedding came and went and I continued to dream of unborn Kyrianne, of work at the grocery store and of course, the occasional meteor-destroying-earth-and-the-resulting-evacuation-bus scenario. However, since the wedding, I have dreamt thrice of white dresses and orange bouquets only to wake up melancholy that it is all over. But the sweet memories persist.

After Erin and I finally made it back to the hotel and showered, our buddy, the photographer came over to take some shots of us getting ready. Erin fixed my hair, which I loved and Shea even found a window in feeding times to stop by the room and say 'we' (to the hair-doing that is). We scrambled to get our things together and make it over to the church where my lovely friends were waiting. Al: making the communion bread. Laura: scratching out a misprint in the program (OMYGOSH, that's another epic tale) And Christy: setting up parking signs and waiting with my much-anticipated soy latte. Our buddy, Mike got some shots of us slathering my face with Mary Kay and before I knew it, it was time to pass out the bouquets and take one helluva lot of pictures.

I've witnessed the moment before where the bride and groom see each other for the first time- it always feels like an odd thing. Like the emphasis becomes the outfit, the surprise of seeing each other in that old, traditional garb: the white, the tux, the shiny cheeks and foreheads. In fact, I have loathed this moment to a lesser scale: when going on dates or to formal dances, that horrible precarious moment of walking down the stairs, thinking- am I trying to hard? Is this justified, its only a dance? But when Mike told me its time to see Patrick, I looked up at the door to the sanctuary and somehow I didn't feel any of it. It is a testimony to how close we've gotten over the past couple months that I burst through the door with a grin and we smiled like it was Scott field and we were going to the antique store with a stop at the vegetable stand.

And, for the tables...

2010-08-11T06:55:00.000-07:00

Its the third day of my new full time work and for the first time, I'm not deliriously tired. In fact, it is so serene and cool sitting here in the living room this morning that I feel the ability to throw together a few more details. Though the morning of the wedding held this feeling of calm sweetness, I can't say the weather was cool.

My mom and sister, Erin had thrown together these table ideas: white clothes with beautiful pink runners and since Laura and I have worked tirelessly (with Patrick, too, of course) to sew orange napkins out of bedsheets, we stuck those in the drinking glasses- the cherry on top. Each runner was set with potted herbs (some of which Erin transplanted into the garden last night)and stuck with a table designator. After some debate we chose fabric prints: stripe, checks, hound's tooth, paisley, argyle for all the professors. The bridal table was eyelet.

We had been there days before, almost all of Thursday, marking in our memories the most shady spots, and though I had envisioned all the tables in some beautiful continuous half-circle, I eventually came to my senses and we clustered them in groups beneath the trees. As it was, several tables all picked up and moved a few times during the party to chase the tree-cover, making me feel that the gesture was appreciated.

Though heavy and humid, there was still a light breeze at around 8 o'clock when I arrived. Erin, her mysterious friend, Robert, my cousin and her best friend, my faithful aunt and of course my mom (my dad and uncle were in St. Louis picking up the sound system) and I went from table to table, laying out the plan, carrying heavy stacks of freshly washed dishes from the barn to lay at each place, trying desperately to keep track of the seating chart, 10 paisleys, 6 polka-dots, 8 plaid. At 9:15 I hurried Erin to the car and we raced back to Greenville to get ready. At 9:30 I had the treat of meeting the caterer! She was staying in our hotel and we found her eating breakfast. What a delight.

It's gonna be so great

2010-08-03T07:17:00.000-07:00

"It's gonna be just like my wedding day," someone wise once said, and then went on to describe a car trip filled with cigarettes, truck stops, and singing out the window. This morning as I sit here in the one blessedly tidy space in this hazardously cluttered apartment, all I can think about is packing up the car and heading for the cowboys. Our cooler is clean and waiting, two bags of ice are perched in the freezer and our backpacks hold two sleeping bags, a tent and 12 new peaches from Trader Joe's, where I get a discount now because I have a ring on my finger. And while I can't wait for the miles of driving ahead or the sweaters and loose change, it was all really nothing like my wedding day.

But its so close that if I reached out behind me, I could still swipe it with my outstretched hand, a little soft around the edges now, but bright, full of meaning. So anyway, I wanted to write down a few memories before the now-vivid pictures in my mind thin to fragments and float away into the whirl-wind everyone describes in which they ate nothing and spoke to no one, because at the moment, when I think about that food, I still feel full...

The morning of the wedding day dawned hazy, with an appropriately complicated sunrise, blue swirled with amber, streaked with pink giving us the sense that the weather wanted to be on our side. Erin and I lay in bed, giggling at Mom and Dad who had assumed their normal postures at 5AM: scurrying around the room, calling out lists to one another, thinking out loud through vehicle options. We relived the night before in which we'd each drank several beers in our buddy's hotel room down the hall with as many friends as we could pack in the place, then listened to everyone offer Pat sex advice as the night drew to a close. When we finally gave into the fact that sleep would not come again, we rose, dressed, and went downstairs to eat breakfast, where she filled me in on the details of her week so far: an adventure so epic, so downright surprising it deserves its own blog entry. I ate oatmeal and we watched the buffalo. At 6:35, I grabbed the car keys and walked out into the day.

A friend of mine (whose adventures are also epic) had managed a free ride to Greenville, IL the night before from St. Louis and having come across the Econolodge in her travels, decided to stay a few nights. "Great, now you can run with me!" I told her when she texted me the night before. "Oy," was her response when I told her the time, "See you then." We caught up on the car ride to campus; it could have been any other day, which I loved. She's not from the midwest like I am, so she was thrown by the humidity. "But its morning!" Yeah, here in Seattle, mornings mean sweaters and socks and uncomfortably chilly breezes. In Greenville, the sweater hangs in the air.

We wound our way to the rec center and met my old running pal who was just married about two months ago, though two years my junior. We rolodexed through our running friends, catching each other up on the details. "if it seems like everyone we know is married with babies, its because they are," we explained to the northwesterner among us. Three miles later, we panted around Scott Field like the old days and ran into Christy, ecstatic with the morning. Seeing her walking up the road to Jo's Java like that made me feel like we were still in college. She ran to me, kissed me on the cheek, yelling, "the bride!" and we talked through the day. I checked my watch and we hustled back to the car. I dropped off my pal at the Econolodge and made haste for the barn where my aunt and cousin and mom were already tirelessly setting up the rest of the tables and unpacking the various table clothes.

And then she flew the coop

2010-07-27T16:26:00.000-07:00

I wish I had the time to sit and unpack all of the ways I am feeling about what happened last Tuesday, just a week ago today, but I don't. Around me there are family and phone calls, flooded apartments and photographer timelines. Outside their are porch swings, grills sizzling in muggy air; in our car there are stacks of plates-- 110 in total. Tomorrow there are appointments and airports, meetings and cups of coffee and soon there will be cars to juggle, babies to meet, people to visit and with whom to reunite, schedules to organize, cakes to decorate, and then hair, make-up, rehearsals, outfits and last minute rentals, ironing and a lot of --gulp-- praying for the rain to stay away. I am thinking about meeting my niece, dreaming icons with my sister, all our matching outfits, cleaning the barn, running all my old college routes, mile after sweet-smelling mile...

when all I really want to do it sit down and think about what happened which is that I quit last Tuesday, the 20th of July. I quit the grocery store, and it's all over.

Kyrianne: growing

2010-07-13T20:29:00.000-07:00

We are all more alive now. We are all more than we were. Somehow we are all reproduced, but not as duplicates, and not as the sum of our parts. She is Mom and Dad, but also Vicki and Brooke. She is Drew, of course, but all that is in Sarah and their brother is in her also. And I feel most profoundly that she is Shea, and yet Erin and I are new in her also. We have new toes, untouched by pavement or trails, teeth without cavities, hands that haven't been scraped or covered in mud, knees that haven't been skinned.

And yet, there is something 'other' about her also. Although she profoundly is the collection of all of us, she is also mysteriously profoundly herself. She will cry and it will make us smile. She will drift off to sleep in the afternoons while we are awake. She'll hunger, desire, be comforted, discover-- and they will be hers alone. And our doting witness will be the confirmation of the greatest of all miracles: she is unique!

We are more, we are multiplied, not just in quantity but in the space between us, which mystically links us all afresh: family again.

Going home

2010-07-10T23:39:00.000-07:00

Even though I usually come out to be alone in the mornings, it is nighttime now, and I feel the same unexplainable stirring I do at 5am. What is it about being alone with the dark world that makes you examine your life?

I'm afraid there's just too much I haven't considered.

I found Caballo Blanco; he's on facebook, can you believe it?! He is the burnt-out, beat-up ex-kick-boxing champ in Born to Run that I mentioned in an old post. He leads tours now in Mexico and training camps for runners. I wrote and asked him a question and to my amazement, he wrote back. It is utterly unnecessary to explain how compelled I feel to start saving my nickels and joy-running every chance I get.

Two days ago I set out ten minutes before five in the morning and ran thirteen miles in my Vibrams [barefoot running shoes] just to see if I could. For two days since then I have hobbled and winced. But sometimes there is just so much I need to do before I get where I'm going. I need the miles of dirt and sidewalk winding ahead. I need the sudden pain or the rain storm that might chase me, or that little corner of my running slipper that's worn through to the toe. And if running 13 miles brings you face-to-face with all your fears and demons, running 13 miles barefoot allows you to meet those same demons in your feet. Today I tried to run again, but its so hot now that I walked home 3 miles in, shaking.

I read my friend's blog tonight and she mentioned home-coming. It is a particularly interesting discussion as she is coming to the close of a year-long stay in Kenya, and though she will be boarding a plane soon to reunite with old faces, this is not the 'home' to which she refers. Instead, she describes the long-awaited assurance of her place in the community where she currently resides in Africa; it is a different sort of home-coming: A coming-into-herself that will inevitably lead out again.

As I read her lovely words, I found myself sitting with a longing-bird flapping its scraggly wings in my gut. There is so much I love in the world (and more particularly so much I love about being alive) that somehow what I really want for myself has become muddled. I have always been quite happy, and yes- easy to please. But what does it mean if happiness is so effortless? that I am thrilled by the waking-sleeping-eating-discovering-weeping-meeting drama that is the mundane? Is my content a testament to the place I've found in my community or just my insatiable taste for sturdy, functional rhythm? I just can't help but wonder if maybe my lack of criticism has devalued the life I have built for myself- or rather the one I have stumbled upon and accepted as suitable. I am so overstimulated by routine-- whatever routine it may be-- that suddenly I am heart-broken by the idea of leaving the grocery store because so much of what I believe is good and right is tangled in getting up everyday and clocking in.

It may be that the most true thing I did was admitting to my supervisor that it was time for me to move on. And yet in the end, I don't really believe it matters whether or not I stay at my job or leave, so don't mishear me on that point. I am happy. I don't begrudge a good thing just because it comes easily: I love my family beyond words, I have sweet, supportive friends and a beautiful city to explore and enjoy. I just hope I've been brave enough- that though I haven't really traveled the world, I've learned how to face the foreigner who lives in my chest and hold up the torch until home appears.

Right now, it feels safe and true to admit that there are still miles and miles to go.

Staying put

2010-07-05T09:11:00.000-07:00

"I think I need to quit."

I heard my words hanging in the slanting sun, indiscreet and huge. But I wasn't startled; it felt like breathing. It was right, and necessary and proud. He stared back at me, the new sun glinting off his name tag, reflecting 'SUPERVISOR' into my steady gaze. "Uh---" was all he got out before the torrent began. Something about his momentary display of kindness, his odd-ball personality,the way I'd never considered him a sounding board in the past, and perhaps the horrendous ordeal of uncovering nasty gossip (again) made me plow forward. I told him that I had once loved working here, had become disillusioned, and somehow liked it well enough still. I explained my attempt to view work as intrinsically worthwhile, as solid and steady, and as an opportunity to teach myself the art of becoming a cog. I told him that I wasn't in it for self-actualization, to be unique or pursue vocation, but to sculpt my own inner-fortitude, to be reliable, hard-working and pay my rent. And I told him that I'd been weighing and considering all these things for two years, and I didn't need to consider it anymore. I was done.

In January, I asked to write an order. January passed, order-writers swapped; my name stayed off the list. Then in March I was asked to be a part of a special team, and I accepted with pleasure. And yet, the ordeal that followed is too exhausting to type out here: the miscommunication, the pressure of shifting management, my own frantic ineptitude, the dead ends, the promises that still hang in the air unanswered and now just plain unmentioned. In May, for whatever reason, I was taken off morning shifts. Adjusting to the tasks of mid-shifts was apparently more strenuous than I imagined, because in the last week of May I was pulled aside by my favorite supervisor and asked 'if you even want to be here anymore since you refuse to help customers,' a sentiment I am still puzzled by. (When he transferred out of our store a month later, I hardly knew how to feel.) And then, in the end of June as we came upon our annual summer hour slump, I found myself moving from 36 hours a week to 20,(a cut so drastic I can't even fathom paying my rent this month- thankfully I don't have to. Instead I have to move) and then this past week to 14. Yes, 14 hours of work this week.

So when a coworker offered her Saturday morning shift, I had no reason to say 'no.' 'Yes!' I said, 'Wonderful!' But that's precisely when the shit hit the fan. In the (nearly) two years of my employment, I have worked so many Saturday mornings, I can't even begin to count, and yet for some reason when we asked our supervisor for the switch, he pulled me aside and said:

"Kristin, I just want to be honest with you. I need to tell you that there's been a lot of bad feeling about you working a Saturday amongst crew members and, you know, a lot of the [supervisors] have been saying it too, so we'll probably just put you on flowers or something, and you've really got to, you know, go full-throttle-- I mean, everyone's been saying that you always say, 'I'm not really worried about getting done this morning because somebody always comes to help me,' and that just doesn't reflect well on you, and-- you know, its not always true. we're really tight Saturday mornings and I just want to be sure you're not going to have that attitude-- I mean, I like you, Kristin and when I hear things like that, I take it with a grain of salt, but I'm like, okay, if she said that, its bad news and you're really going to have to work hard to lose that perception of you, because like, everyone is really having a bad feeling about it, and I just want you to know, its going around."

I don't have the first clue what to do about this. This is called gossip; I know that much, because I remember it from high school. But in high school all you have to do is look him or her (or your bathroom mirror, depending on how its going) in the eye and say, "nuh-uh!" and its done. When you're 16, this sort of thing flies, but I'm 24, and you know, a professional. So I just looked at him. "Well, I'm not sure how to respond to that," I told him. "I have never said that. I certainly don't feel it. I'm just wracking my brains trying to think how I could have said something close to that." And really, who would be annoyed enough with me to report something like that, even if I did say it, which I didn't. Why would I?! I am worried about getting my job finished in the mornings, excessively so. What's more, I really like everyone I work with during these shifts. We laugh together, we swap stories. Doesn't it seem that everyone who wakes up before five in the morning must share some kind of special kinship? Which one of these good-natured morning sweethearts went and ratted me out when I had my back turned, took some comment (though I still can't imagine what) and twisted it to mean I was flippant, unconcerned, and sure someone else would pull my weight?

And then, (back in the office) he did something horrible, and reached out and touched my arm. It was light touch, but intentioned, and said, "I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, honey." And that's when I burst into tears. I am just so exhausted of working against some perception. This sort of thing has just never happened to me before. I've always been a star student, a team player with a positive attitude that isn't an effort for me to muster. I turned and left the office, fled past Patrick in the wine section whose face froze as the sight of my tears, and into the bathroom where I sunk to the floor for the hundreth time and sobbed. Just cried, and cried, because I am so tired, because I don't feel like myself anymore and mostly because somebody doesn't like me, which is a horrible, horrible fault of mine (so damn sensitive).

And two minutes later, I picked myself up, wiped my eyes and resignedly asked my supervisor for a chat. He said yes, and that we should go out and catch a little sun. I smiled, and told him I want to quit. That I'm done, that I want to leave high school behind once and for all.

And after an hour of wonderfully humanizing conversation (in which he actually offered me--off the record of course--career advice!!) I told him, give me some time, I'll think about it.

Since then I have talked to some friends- including Pat, who was (probably appropriately) furious with me for even considering quitting without talking to him about it and simultaneously devastated on my behalf- who have offered a little perspective. And just as liberating as it was to stand up and say with assurance, "I'm ready to move on," I feel a vice close over my chest as I admit, I just can't quit my job. There's not enough money. So tomorrow will be another day as usual, one to nine.

I'm so overwhelmed I'm not sure where to turn, but it helps to think of my dad, who worked in a job he disliked for ten years to help me through college. (What a wimp I am.) It also helps that my sweet sister and brother-in-law have forced me to pray every day, multiple times a day for the rest of my life as I manage to sneak my precious niece into every conversation I have: Kyrianne, Kyrianne:

Lord have mercy,
Lord have mercy on it all.

Kyrianne Jane Tuttle Willson

2010-06-27T11:40:00.000-07:00

It's been the most surreal day. Everything I do is draped in this feeling of being an aunt and this little person really being in the world. I can't get over the idea that she is somehow totally Shea and Drew and at the same time, now finally something totally separate from them. How did they do that? I am okay with the genes and the organs and the ten fingers and toes- but how did they give her that little light: the will, the soul?

Born to be Barefoot

2010-06-23T13:05:00.000-07:00

After reading Born to Run during the majority of my flight from Tucson in April, I did the smallest amount of research possible and then ordered barefoot running shoes online. They’re called vibram five-fingers and they look a bit like alien shoes-- I’ve thought about this quite a lot-- mostly because we’re not used to the fact that we actually have five toes. Seeing them all splayed out there encased in black nylon (or bright red, mossy green, even sunshine yellow) looks strange and sort of flips my stomach like I’m trying to politely avert my gaze from some abnormality. After all, since the advent of cushy heels and gel pods, what exactly are toes for? The annoyance of clipping nails, the weirdness of what gets jammed between them, the frustration and agony of smashing them against doorframes and table legs.

In fact, its been a long time since I’ve had something good to say about my feet in general. When I was a kid, I waited for shoeless summers with a similar intensity as Christmas morning. The first sign came when even grown ups abandoned puffy winter coats, then okay, yes, we can wear short sleeved shirts and finally! the shorts get unpacked from dusty boxes, and last, but certainly not least came the shoes: off with the shoes, bare feet all around! One summer I became so used to treading around without shoes that I walked six blocks to a babysitting job without even noticing there was nothing on my feet.
And yet, somewhere along the way, everything changed. There are many things that may have let to the hating of my feet, but if I had to pin in down to one experience, my guess would be the horror of skating in 3rd grade gym class.

Six weeks out of the year they heaved in great wheeled cubbies full of shoes to fit the wide spectrum of sizes necessary to house the wide spectrum of grade school feet. Think about it for a second: do you remember the third grader whose hands and feet were the size of Barbie shoes? The one who towered above you with dolphin heraches thundering down the stairs? The blessed middle-sized child no one remembers at all. And then they made a spectical of the whole thing by calling you up by size. Size 5 and under, you can retrieve your skates. Okay, now size 6 and 7. Anyone else? Oh yeah, size 7 and up. And three of us would stand in the sea of petite hands struggling to pull on and lace skates over small and normal feet. All seemed to halt as they turned to look up. There’s a size above 7? Really? How? And there we were, apologetically running to the last cubby by the wall, pulling out our clownish two-tone red and green skates (the only colors in that size) and ducking our faces (now the same color as our skates) down to begin the slow attempt at fastening these massive (do they have to be on wheels?!) bodies of canvas and laces to our snow-sled size feet.

Then on a camping trip with my dad I fell over a rogue tent stake and gashed the big toe on my left foot. The toe has healed, but the nail never did.

Then when I started running, they started to smell; am I to blame?!

Then in college when I started running more than sitting by the pool, I got a horrible ring around my ankle: the dreaded sock tan. I stopped wearing sandals. I hated the sight of my feet. And thus we have the present condition. I am flat footed. My feet are white as dolphins and twice the size. My toenail is cracked and discolored. Why, why, why and how could I ever learn to love my feet?

But then I read about barefoot running, and it took me about two paragraphs to be persuaded. Feet are surprising complex (housing as much as 25% of the bones in your body)not to mention architectually brilliant with toes and arches that all function in special ways giving us the ability to walk, run, balance, grip and jump. And yet we, particularly as ahtletes, have spent the last 30 years encasing them in increasingly complex imitations of an already complex, functional form. As Chris McDougall points out, no architect in her right mind would build supports beneath an archway if trying to maintain the integrity of the design. Even a child could deduce building with blocks (though probably without being able to articulate why) that the strengh of the arch comes when force is applied from above. So this is what I take from Chris’ conclusion: I have spent the last fifteen years (with increasing intensity as I have begun running more seriously) actually weakening my already almost non-existant arches. Ack!

Now that I have my vibrams, however, something of my childhood is coming back. I remember the freedom and sweetness of relying on my toes, of loving what my feet can do, how spry I feel, how able to balance and hop and go at a moment’s notice. Last weekend we went camping, and tide-pooling I found my greatest pleasure came not from the star-fish we uncovered the size of a house cat, but instead from the way my toes held and engaged the ground beneath me. Climbing, hopping, balancing, loving them all the (substantial) way from heal to grippy toe.

Collision

2010-06-06T20:48:00.000-07:00

I know, I know... It's June. And its been almost- no, over- a month since I've last taken a minute to process my thoughts in this space. But as the weather outside is still so very frightful, I feel somehow justified in my wait. Yes, I have a lot on my mind, but a lot of it seems to be about large moments, and waiting. Waiting, but everything still manages to plunge forward at such an incredible pace that I can hardly catch my breath.

So we're waiting for sunny days, waiting for the baby (34 weeks along now I think?!), waiting for the endless list of wedding chores to be accomplished (and yeah, at times actively persuing this reality), waiting for vacation, waiting for packages to come in the mail (!!), and I've been waiting for something else too: waiting for it all to come together, to mesh in my mind: what's been happening, my witness to it all. Waiting for something that's unfolding so fast I can no longer hope for cohesion, but brace myself instead for collision. And hope that its manageable, resportable and just plain fine.

Shea said when she first told everyone she was pregnant, she was overwhelmed at her response to their questions. They couldn't stop asking about the sex and what they would name the baby; they wanted the props, the fill-in-the-blank baby. But all Shea thought was "Holy shit, this is a w-HAT now growing in my stomach?" I mean, its a baby in there. A real, live human (wo)man. A short little alien creature that she's somehow responsible for creating and maintaining and how can you even begin to puzzle this out let alone start thinking oh- the sex, oh- the name: yes, it'll be a boy and we'll call it Henry. Nobody thinks to bring up the real issue, you know, not that fact that its a boy or a girl but that its HUMAN.

This is almost exactly how I feel about getting married. Its not just that we're getting married in less than two months or that it'll be in IL and that I'm wearing white and he's wearing beige and we're eating a cake made by his grandmother. It's not that we'll be putting on rings, but what it is that they signify, which is unanimously unclear. Does it have to do with taking out the garbage, with moving across the country, with working at the grocery store day after day? Does it mean I have to go to church, have to agree, have to have an opinion?

Another reason I am slow to blog is the increasing attachment Pat has to his computer which greatly hinders my own access. And so, I bought Patrick an early wedding gift. And though it is actually mine and I sit typing these words upon it, it was Pat's sanity and happiness I had in mind when I bought this sweet little netbook and waited for it to arrive in the mail. It is the size of a large paperback novel, and just about as heavy. So hurrah! Independent blogging!

Lonely Roads, Mix CDs

2010-05-02T19:36:00.000-07:00

a year or so ago, Pat made me a mix CD (inspired, in part I am sure, by my sister and brother in law who compile clever, incredibly romantic lists of songs to convey their feelings to each other). However, Pat's expressed his relationship not with me, but with God throughout his life. Typical. Anyway, as my own relationship both with faith and the faithful community has turned over afresh I have thought more than once about doing the same. Tonight I'm inspired by Joni Mitchel and her song All I Want, which I'm officially naming as the first song on the list.

It starts:

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling
Looking for something, what can it be

Oh I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some

Born to Run (and run and run)

2010-04-19T18:19:00.000-07:00

In faith that it would turn out well, my roommate, Christy bought me a present for running the marathon. It was a book (of course), one we've discussed and I've been recommended more times than I can count on all my toes (more later). Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall. It is the unceremonious blow-by-blow of one journalist's personal struggle with running that lead him so far outside himself, he eventually woke up one day in the secluded canyons of Mexico and ran a 50-mile race through the mountains with a bare-footed man, a bunch of Indians, a super-star, a scraggly burnt out ex-kick-boxing champ, and a couple of crazy college kids who blew off their finals to tag along.

Last Friday afternoon I took a bus to the train station where I caught the next train to the airport, traveling first to LA and then to Tucson, AZ where I spent the weekend with friends from high school, one of whom got married Saturday. Sunday I spent nine and a half hours either sitting in the airport or flying after which I again took a train and then a bus back to my home. In every spare moment, I read. Upon arriving home again, Christy asked me, "How was it?!" I stared back at her blankly, bleary eyed from so much travel; trying to make meaning from her words was like waking up from a dream- a dream of dark, mysterious canyons, dusty trails, and beautiful, grippy bare feet...

"Kristin, how was your trip?" I blinked a few times, grinned and then asked, "Which one?"

I have read about running before, and it has been a wonderful thing. Often I find myself chucking aside my copy of Once a Runner or Ultra-Marathon Man to pull on my Asics and rocket down the street, my mind swimming with possibility or determination. But I've always felt something else, too-- a disconnect. The accounts I read or the runners with whom I happily share ideas, trails and advice always leave me feeling displaced. No, I don't run to think out complex issues. No, I can't run when I'm mad to blow off steam. I run best when I'm full of joy, when I feel lit up inside by potential or connectedness to the world-- and its impossible to say which comes first: the connection or the running. I suppose it isn't always the same.

I coached with Girls on the Run for two seasons, and it was a lot of fun. Still, often I found myself listening to lovely women (fellow coaches) sharing heart-breaking stories of low or budding self-esteem, how running helped them to form a positive body image, gain confidence in their ability, etc, etc... And yeah, I resonate with that, but only to a point. Of course I've had insecurities, and sure, a great many of them revolve around my body, and yes, hell yes have I hoped that my body would one day morph into a tiny, rock-hard version of what it is now on account of all the miles and pounding I've logged. But the truth is, it hasn't. And most of the time, I love it anyway, and I'm happy with the way that I look. But the point is, if I was running to love myself or to be loved, I would have quit a long time ago. To be fair, my confidence and self-esteem probably have improved tremendously since I first took to the roads with the team my sophomore year, but such a ethereal and intangible sort of theory just isn't enough to get me out there day after rainy, windy, chilly day. And I'm honestly just not that thoughtful all of the time- running for me is more basic than all that. It's more animal, less higher being.

And I've tried being great too, but that side of things never got too tempting, since I never excelled all that much. As I mentioned above I recently read Once a Runner, the fictional account of a tremendously successful college athlete who put in 160 mile weeks just to hit a sub 4:00 once in his life on a little black oval. And on one hand I totally got him- I knew the similar love and hate of a hard workout, the drive and impulse of a team, the fatigue of two-a-days, of recovering from a long run with a morning run, then an 8 mile workout in the same twelve hour period. But obviously I lost him whenever he won. And that sadness that continuously characterized the experience of the champions within that story; I found it so uncomfortable as I finished the book. 'What was the point of fulfilling their goals?' I found myself asking- and 'Why, why, why were they so sad when it came?'

And though on one hand, I felt irritated with his scathing perspective of the Lesser Runner or the exuberantly chatty-and-effusive Poet Runner (this might be personal), I pitied him also. The burden of excellence is huge. And yeah, maybe sad at times, because who really knows why it is chased, just that it seems that one must if one can, attempt to run one pure, perfect mile, especially if it is one of the fastest in the world.

Though obviously enjoyable and often inspiring, reading about running also forces me into a little soul-searching. I'm constantly wondering why I run. Not just races or even once a day after work, but why do I run to bus stops, to work every morning, to the top of hills in the rain or the dark- not just when I'm late, but all the time. It's part instinct, part just a feeling of hugeness in my chest, but its also just a desire to unlock, and to go. When Jenn, one of the college students in the story, describes her feelings about running I finally feel my heart leap. I couldn't put it better myself: "'I never discussed this with anyone because it sounds pretentious, but I started running ultras [races longer than 26.2] to become a better person,' Jenn told me. 'I thought if you could run one hundred miles, you'd be in this Zen state. You'd be the f---ing Buddha, bringing peace and a smile to the world. It didn't work in my case-- I"m the same old punk-ass as before-- but there's always that hope that it will turn you into the person you want to be, a better, more peaceful person.

'When I'm out on a long run,' she continued, 'the only thing in life that matters is finishing the run. For once, my brain isn't going blehblehbleh all the time. Everything quiets down, and the only thing going on is pure flow. It's just me and the movement and the motion. That's what I love-- just being a barbarian, running through the woods.'"

The super-star among them, winner and record-setter of many hundred mile races out there, made a special impression on me as well. In high school, he ran at the back of his pack. He just wasn't all that fast, and although something obviously changes for him later in life, something of these formative years seems to remain. By the time McDougall reflects on all this, he is not just a reporter, but a participant in the story, and is preparing to run the 50-mile final event. He knows Scott now not just as a subject, but as something of a teammate as well, and says, "What Coach Vigil sensed about character... Scott had been all his life. The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other, he understood, but to be with each other. Scott learned that before he had a choice, back when he was trailing Dusty and the boys through the Minnesota woods. He was no good and had no reason to believe he ever would be, but the joy he got from running was the joy of adding his power to the pack. Other runners try to disassociate from fatigue by blasting iPods or imagining the roar of the crowd in an Olympic Stadium, but Scott had a simpler method: it's easy to get outside yourself when you're thinking about somebody else."

When the race finally begins, McDougall, though last in the pack, feels far better than he expects. At the half-way point he is at just over three hours, far ahead of his projected pace. Thrilled by all the success at this point in the story, my heart is pounding for him to crash through his expectations and finish in 7 or 8 hours. But he didn't- though he did cross the finish line, it took him over twelve hours. The first guys had been waiting for him almost as long as it had taken them to run the entire course.

Woah, what a let-down I thought. Then Scott walks up to him, McDougall says just what I felt, but the super-star ultra champ just claps his back and says something like: yeah, but it takes a lot more courage to race 12 hours than 7.

And the affect of reading these words in the wake of my wildly exciting forty-five minute improvement, nearly-10 minute pace 4:25 marathon was huge. It was as if I was handed the ability to drag my first marathon up by the armpits and raise it into the air, shouting "This is a success!" It took courage. And I have to admit, though it felt damn good to finish that marathon having run the whole thing with gusto, it actually wasn't as hard as the first one. It is easier to accept what happened that day, and harder to remember the Rock and Roll. So which one is the true success?

Well, the next one, I hope! And I have my eyes on a 31.3 ultra next spring, which I plan to love, love, love every step of the way.

My pit crew

2010-04-14T16:20:00.000-07:00

Whidbey Island- Part II

2010-04-14T15:50:00.000-07:00

I keep catching the drift of sunny blooms, and remembering last summer: the food bank and the Mormons and the Rock and Roll Marathon.

It is not possible to carry this one around with me without remembering the despair of last July, the four slow weeks that followed the painful failure of that particular run. In the weeks leading up to the Whidbey, I did everything I could to suppress the memory: the hot, long miles, the impossible clamp around my throat, the frantic short breathing, the burning in my gut, the swimmy-buzzy panic in my head. And now that it has past, and the thrilled, relieved whirring has calmed, I can't stop thinking about that hot, mid-summer day.

In college when I ran my last cross country meet a similar feeling of despair ensued. In the crucial moment, I had given up on myself and in the following days could only dwell on the concept of not being able to gain that crucial moment back. Though we lofty thinker-beings oft feel able to rise above the primal notions of mere time and space, we live and die by them, too. And a swell mile isn't the same as a swell mile at the crucial moment. You can't get it back: it is a conditional gift of a single place and time, and you either deliver or you don't.

In the third mile of the Whidbey Island last Sunday, we ran through a Hawaiian-themed water station and they tossed leis around our necks as we ran past. I caught up to my running partner and we laughed about it and compared times. We were going quick- our third mile put us around a 9:10 average our excitement at this small achievement carried us a few happy miles. I wasn't familiar with this pace, certainly not at this distance, but as I told C., I felt great and why not go with a great thing while it lasts? (note this odd optimism. something very strange was happening.) We passed and were passed by a man several times with whom we exchanged several jokes as we powered up and over smallish hills. "Good luck" we called out each time, "Good job!"

At mile seven the real hills started and my stomach rumbled with hunger. I can't remember ever feeling hungry in the first marathon and I wasn't sure what to do. I pulled a honey-gel shot from my pocket and chewed it slowly, but my stomach still felt empty so I told myself the half was right around the corner, and truly felt that it was so. Again, this strange ability to not be overwhelmed with the distance. It must have been luck- or Imogen Heap who was now being piped into my thrumming brain.

At 2:03, we clocked in for the half marathon, our quickest half yet. (1:57 makes a perfect 9 minute mile pace) I knew that Mom, Christy, Pat, along with a few other close friends planned to meet us at the halfway point, but upon crossing the marker and seeing nobody around I seriously considered that I might have taken a wrong turn. Though I wanted to see them and had been looking forward to the friendly faces, I also desperately longed for the food. I knew that mom was armed with bananas and plumbs and nut-and-date bars and wanted to take as much as I could hold.

Nearly to mile 14, I saw them. My mother handed me two plums, a banana and half an energy bar, and I turned down a 1.5 mile path, what's known as a 'turn-around' so-called because at the end you simply turn around and trot back the way you came. On the way back, I spotted my running partner half a mile behind me, and met my friends and mother again on the other end, right around mile 16.

Whidbey Island- part I

2010-04-12T19:31:00.000-07:00

They say marathons are like childbirth. That you have to forget the pain before you could possibly trick yourself into repeating the whole ordeal. And for the record, if I do happen to have a baby and its birth is anything like my first marathon, it will have to be knock-your-socks-off cute and exceptionally well-behaved for me to even consider growing another one.

And yet, yesterday at 6:40 in the morning I found myself rumbling along in a big yellow school bus through the winding back roads of Oak Harbor to the start of the thirteenth annual Whidbey Island Marathon. Since we’re on the subject of babies, let’s just call this one my little accident. I ran the half there last year, and it was exquisitely beautiful. What can I say? I am a sucker for the rolling hills, the mountains on the horizon, the sprawling, greenish bodies of water almost everywhere the eye falls. Isn’t this how most surprises happen: a proclivity towards persuasion by loveliness and a real ability to forget?

So there I was in my sweats, shivering next to heat lamp on a dock, sucking down a foil packet of chocolate flavored vegan agave, actually feeling quite good about my prospects.

My longest continuous run for this training, twenty miles, had been manageable, even kindly, and since a friend gave hers to me before she moved away (-but I would give it back in a second just to have her around again!), I’ve been biking to the preschool on Fridays. And there’s the occasional recreational ride when I’m not working or running or busy watching box-set television. My legs have just felt better, and my mind feels better, too.

And, okay. There’s this confession to make: I ran it with an iPod. Yeah. Okayokayokayokayokay. I know I said “I don’t believe in iPods.” And I don’t! Well, to the extent that they become isolating or a crutch or try to trick you into forgetting the task at hand. There’s just so much: the quietness of your mind despensing lovely, blockish exposition like ice cubes, or brimming over with frustration, or the occasional thrill of a new idea strolling across the marquee of your movie-theatre brain, making you worry what other things you haven’t run far enough to realize.

But, here’s the thing- you’ve just got to forgive me, because running a marathon is really pretty tough. I know in the age of ultra-marathoners and the Tarahumara outrunning gazelles, I sound sort of last-decade, and I’m sure if I ever become Western States material (more on this later), I will give up my (borrowed) iPod. But as we know from studying (and believe me, there has been some studying) my previous failures [read: panic attack at mile 19 that shrunk my airway to the size of a coffee stirrer] there is a teensy problem with my mind. It has some short-comings, okay, and if you run far enough you will find yours, too. So, in conclusion, I did not attempt to stifle the task and I made my small talk like always, but I needed a guide, some non-linear alternative to the grueling miles banging by, constantly reminding me how far I had to go.

I listened to choral music! Who could blame me? It was soft, and layered, and looked good on the mountains and with the gorgeous sun that streamed down. I accidentally ran a 9:30 first mile, and an 8:45 (!!) number two, and I knew, even then.

Bodies/Food

2010-04-04T19:05:00.001-07:00

Phillip and Patrick just went home after a long afternoon of wine, delicious food and fascinating conversation. Christy is off to work, and I just hung up the phone with my mother. The buzzing of my head has decreased to a hum and the pots and pans stacked in the sink along with the exhaustion in my back tells me that good company has come and gone.

The effect is mysteriously mirrored internally: As it has been since my junior year of college, Easter Sunday spins me away from the body of believers, again alone in my disbelief, disquiet, and confusion. For forty days, and increasingly over this past weekend, I have felt the sweet company of the Church's orbit toward my tiny corner of the universe, where Mark's mute terror and amazement have morphed into loud unhappy professions of my own frustrations with the faith. But today Christians move into the blessed joy of resurrection, an end to the doubt and emptiness of our sometimes-mundane existence, and so ends my movement with them. Here I stay- for now anyway.

I wish I could tell you why: the feeling that I am ready to let go of what I've increasingly allowed myself to admit is somewhat unrealistic is strangely akin to my intuitive sense about eating animals: the basic reluctant suspicion that there is simply more than meets the eye, that beneath the smiling, chewing, laughing warmth there is suffering that isn't heard. I'm desperate to find a Christianity that acts in concern for the environment, for suffering beings, that challenges me in my ability to support and give care to these basic human needs-- but I'm growing impatient, in myself just as much as in the Church. And while I certainly know myself to be a hypocrite in my convictions, such knowledge only intensifies my longing for accountability. I don't want to count on going away to heaven; I believe in kingdom stuff here, and now, and in what I eat for dinner. I want someone to call me up or come to my door and ask me if I've started eating locally yet, not when I've been to church last, not how many I've told about Jesus, whose late, late flesh (like most) is beginning to lose its taste.

I tell myself: I am a Christian, I just don't believe in afterlife away-from-here. I am a Christian, but that doesn't necessitate a love for the Old Testament, and a lot of people disagree with Paul; I am a Christian, but that doesn't definitely mean I hold a belief in virgin birth; in divinity; in literal creation; literal resurrection.

And when it comes so far, to this (I am a cat, but with dog ears and a doggy wet nose, and big dog feet, and rancid doggy breath, and a messy dog-tail, but a cat), maybe its just time to call it what it is. Maybe there is no Christian like me because I've stepped a step or two, too far.

In her book, Take this Bread Sara Miles tells the story of herself as a left-wing lesbian atheist who steps into a church to take communion, and finds herself so moved by the experience of being fed that she becomes a Christian and dramatically reorients her life toward feeding others. I picked up her book on Good Friday, hoping for peek into some radically progressive, generous Christianity that might tether me afresh to my faith. And I can't help but note ruefully how opposite my experience has been: that I spent my life thus far believing, then more or less stepped into a food bank to volunteer and found myself so deeply moved by the experience of being fed that I feel inclined to leave the church altogether. Its not just the food that I eat there, but the earnestness of the volunteers and the staff, the overwhelming care present in their secular tasks, and the sweet simplicity of sorting rotten fruit for hungry bellies.

Despite all this, I pulled myself out of bed this morning at 4:30AM (an hour not unknown to me at the grocery store!) to drive into Queen Anne, to the beautiful Episcopalian church my friends and I attend for the Easter vigil, a three hour-long account of the story of Christianity starting with Creation. Afterward they served a breakfast of eggs, croissants and champagne (hall-e-lujah!) of which of course I ate the fruit cup, and then went out for a waffle at my favorite vegan joint.

As I tuck myself into bed tonight (tomorrow I will inhabit my normal space in the wee hours of the morning: unloading frozen cases or trays of bread), the words of the liturgy run through my mind and like usual, I am mystically comforted and not irritated by their presence.

I want to close with another holy reading, one I've found incredibly comforting if not salvific- not yet:

Everywhere I saw bodies, and food.

Food and bodies had always been wrapped up in meaning for me: They were my way of understanding the world. But it would take decades to have these accumulated experiences make sense in a narrative, much less one I'd call Christian. It took actually eating a piece of bread-- a simple chunk of wheat and yeast and water-- to pull those layers of meaning together: to make food both absolutely itself and a sign pointing to something bigger. It turned out that the prerequisite for conversion wasn't knowing how to behave in church, or having a religious vocabulary or an a priori "belief" in an abstract set of propositions: It was hunger, the same hunger I'd always carried.

- take this bread, sara miles, xiv

Saturday

2010-04-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

And the winds are rumored up to 50mph. Beneath the gusts and the layers and the pull-string hoods my head and heart are churning with the feeling that the time has finally come.

I have wondered and wondered when, have been watching for it like a second coming, but it came when I wasn't looking just as they said it would. Now on the eve of Easter Sunday, I find myself liturgically appropriate both in my massive unbelief, and my grief that god is finally dead.

Body piercing saved my (social) life

2010-03-12T19:13:00.000-08:00

All my thoughts this past week can be fit inside a single interaction I had at the grocery store Thursday afternoon.

"I hate to be personal," an elderly woman told me as I rang up her groceries, "But I have to ask: do they mind your piercings here?" I shook my head and explained her to how I had taken my nose and lip stud out for the interview, but was told they would both be allowed upon hire. I've actually had this conversation quite a few times in line, checking groceries. This women was not an atypical Seattlite: tall, slender, eccentrically dressed, grey hair swept up under a neat little woolly cap, with a deep, husky voice and quick, intelligent conversation.

"You know every generation has their rebellion," she told me matter-of-factly, packing wine and ginger into reusable grocery bags. "First its very bad to pierce your nose, and soon it doesn't mean anything, like choosing a blue shirt or pink lipstick." "Wonder what the next generation will do to rebel?" I said. She rolled her eyes, "Oh, probably something really bad. They'll probably be religious."

Food for thought

2010-02-16T21:01:00.000-08:00

After I told him, "And the longest they ever let a 'broiler chicken' live is 42 days! And birds like that would be able to live, like, ten years!", Patrick stared at me with his head cocked to one side, a deep thoughtful frown etched in his features. "Well," he said finally, "is that bad necessarily? Is mutton more ethical than lamb?" I thought about it for a while in stony silence and then felt tears pouring down my cheeks. "Hey! I didn't mean to--" Pat started. "But they just hang there!" I cried in anguish, "Upside down, on a conveyor belt by their feet and a machine slits their throats and the blood drains out. And they're so scared that they poop on themselves which is why virtually all chickens have E. coli," I finished with a final snuff. And there you have it. I have officially become someone I hate.

I don't want to stop eating animals because I look at livestock like something stuffed that littered my bed as a child. These aren't the anthropomorphized, hard-plastic eye-balled toys that we offer to children as odd parodies of the shitting, pecking, scratching, grub-snatching animals. The fact is, I may very well just love those little boogers that trot around the backyard of my home in IL, but they just don't love me back. They love the feed we offer them, or the bedding: but the sweetness of the coop our family built together, the care with which my sister, Erin changes the straw or hangs icons for each season behind the water dish are only meaningful to us. Frankly, those birds would just as soon bed down in garbage bins (and they've done this).

And yet this isn't to say that there is no reason for grief. Later during our conversation Pat said something else that has been rolling around in my head all afternoon: Its not as troubling that these awful things happen to chickens as it is that these things happen to our food. At first this comment might sound anthropocentric, but I think there's some truth glimmering behind his meaning. If human beings are the meaning-makers and not the chickens (who didn't even notice this year when we exchanged the Epiphany icon for a Lenten one), and if we are the beings with one foot in the world of philosophy and symbolism (one thing definitely means many other less-tangible things) and one foot in the needy natural (chances are even before you finish reading this you will think of what you'd like to eat for dinner or that you need to use the restroom) , doesn't the question of what we eat deserve the dignity of careful, critical consideration? If what we eat (and therefore support with our dollars) as thinking individuals is cruel or wasteful we must ask ourselves what it means to inhabit this odd space on the food chain. What are we if we eat whatever we feel like eating, or those things with which our culture has become the most comfortable? Its as Jonathan Safran Foer says in his aforementioned book: "To ask 'What is an animal?' ... is inevitably to touch upon how we understand what it means to be us and not them. It is to ask, 'What is a human?'" (p. 46)

Going out, coming in

2010-02-08T19:25:00.000-08:00

This is how my day started:

It is just after 6am, I'm dumping organic frozen peas onto a shelf and a co-worker turns to me and asks me to please fill the lugs to the top today, "all the way".

It's hard to explain just what our madness and methods entail, but I will say that telling me to fill the lugs "all the way" might have followed the explanation of where we work, and what exactly it is we sell. I'm not sure how I could have survived a year and (almost) a half in this store without knowing to fill the lugs. Later I was informed that we recycle cardboard. I just kept hoping someone would tell me where to put all the money customers kept tossing across the counter on the way out the door!

I am feeling the tiniest bit cynical, its true, and I don't actually believe that my co-worker thinks I don't know to fill the lugs or that I am stupid or incompetent. All the same, I continue to get the eerie suspicion those around me fear that left to my own devices I might behave like a badly trained ape. All this is to say, I'm thinking again about moving out.

Last summer, desperate to find my vocation else-where, I searched frantically through Craigslist each day, hoping to run into a job where I felt one hundred per cent different than I do here. I wanted to feel appreciated and accountable for and to my own individual quirks and limitations. Finding the preschool has been- and I don't say this lightly- a blessing, but a small, odd, and at times painful one. Two hours a week, and do I really even like it anyway, and is it everything I ever, always wanted? Then I toyed with going to school, a place I've felt loved and known and successful in the past. Now that I have decided against this sturdier known avenue, I'm trying to regain my sea-legs and stay at it a bit longer, facing the wide blue. And this is what I've found:

1. I actually like my job. I don't like some of the stress that comes with it, and at times I feel like a complete idiot. I still blush when I talk to my supervisors and discounting a very small minority, most people know me as A. crazy runner and B. getting married. And yet despite all this, I enjoy the work. It's hard, and its good, and its work.

2. I love to run. Not just to race or to jog around the lake (which are both fabulous) but to adventure. Last week I finally ran from my house to Pioneer square, which is downtown, and reminded me of a goal I made for myself ages ago: to run the bus routes with which I'm most familiar. And then three days later I borrowed a bike and rode from Queen Anne to Lake Forest Park on the Burke-Gilman. 28 miles I estimate, which is great!

3. And as much as I love being vegan right now in preparation for this marathon, I can't help but imagine how I'll feel when its over, if I'll keep on. I am a hungry reader in the past few days, and the more I learn, the more seems to be at stake.

In conclusion, though the pressure of vocational direction sometimes weighs heavy on my too-serious heart, it seems that fortuitous circumstance have handed me a solitary spring. With Patrick in school and Christy finishing up her internship, I have what they both can only wistfully consider (as much as I loath it from time to time): hours and hours and hours of free time. And as the evening light slowly, slowly creeps longer, I'm finding myself post-run at a coffee shop drinking tea and reading about eating animals and trying to decide where it is I stand.

So this time I want to leave the grocery store not for comfort or relief, but for wider spaces, more adventure. Not eating animals (and furthermore, realizing that to do so from this point onward without consideration is not possible), has unburied new questions about my working for a corporation that depends on the horrific factory farming outlined in my current reading material. And yet to regret all this contact with food (here and at the food bank) would be a waste in understanding one of the major building blocks (simply because of the magnitude of what I didn't know about selling food that I now interact with daily) of my eating ethics. I imagine when this is all over (what does that even mean?) I'll have quite a lot to say I am convinced of on the matter of eating, selling, and celebrating food.

I am in transit, and I can only hope that (both ideologically and literally) I have a long, long way to go.

Once a runner

2010-01-29T18:45:00.000-08:00

"The awful truth would begin to dawn on him: there was no Secret! His days would have to be spent in exactly this manner, give or take a mile or two, for longer than he cared to think about, if he really wanted to see the olive wreath up close. It would simply be the most difficult, heartrending process he would endure in the course of his life."

John L Parker

high five

2010-01-26T21:13:00.000-08:00

Epiphany, part II

2010-01-26T20:00:00.000-08:00

Today I made the decision that's been nagging at me for about a month. So its done.

Its the end of January so I suppose it goes without saying that I am restless. This is new for me, this staying here, this not moving out. The rhythms of college are so locked in my bones that the sun shining after a long stretch of cold (and in this case, rain) gives me yen to pack up and change locations. That sweet, forgiving wind sweeps me right to the center of town, prompting my nostalgia, as if I am going somewhere else. But I'm still here, and the affect is a bit like staying at a friends' house too long. We both know its time to go, but neither of us act and thus, we remember the entire event as that awkward aftermath: the hems and haws, the chewing on exhausted topics...

Weeks later, I am still here. Weeks later, I'm still hitting the alarm and walking down Roosevelt to the grocery store. I heat water for tea, I watch television, run and cook my date-and-hemp spelt wrap sandwiches.

Then two mondays ago, a break in the routine. After work, all I want to do is nap, but the sun has burst through the clouds and in order to spend my get-out-and-go energy I grab a pair of shorts(!) and my Asics and hit the road. I don't even have to ask myself where to go. My insides run me straight to the beach, a little over a 5 mile run. There I run up and down the shore, face-to-face with the breath-taking mountain view, amongst other early beach gatherings, gleeful and sweater-clad. After a few minutes I feel the pull again and move on through Ballard, past the seafood restaurants and the locks, then make a right on Shilshole, past the new Trader Joe's, under the Ballard bridge and then grab the Burke-Gilman right after the Fred Myer. From there Fremont is so close I can taste it. As soon as I reach the bridge, I climb the stairs and run the remaining eight minutes to campus, where I meet a breathless Patrick, hurrying into class with a friend. "Hey!" he yells and kisses my cheek on the way in the door. I like that moment in time, and I wanted to save it: I felt like I had somewhere behind me and somewhere ahead and there we were together, synchronized: a student and traveler. I want to spend every day in this way.

However, this little run-in that Monday prompted me to attend class with Pat Thursday. It didn't hurt that the professor was overwhelmingly likable, or that the subject matter was familiar to me, or that Pat and I stayed in class during the break, chattering like parakeets and I remembered again how we met and why we're friends. It didn't hurt that my review at work was less than stellar and I suspect its simply because we're low on funds. And in the end it led me to schedule a meeting with Dr. Strong, the dean of the religion department and the professor behind the grad program to which Patrick currently belongs.

We met today, and I have to say, I wasn't too sure of what to expect. He asked me about the wedding, and though I knew that they had met before I was surprised to learn that he actually attended Princeton with Dr. Hartley, the dean of my own religion department back in Greenville, the one who- if all goes well- will be officiating our wedding. We reminisced, and I mentally walked the old campus and a part of my heart ached for that sort of environment. He showed me a copy of the courses I would take if I studied theology there, a different track than Pat's program in the end but with similar beginnings. I saw myself in the library there and a shiver ran down my spine: oh the red-penned feedback! And then I looked at the carpet under my feet. I felt the flatness of my wallet in my back pocket, thought of what I wanted for my future, for my marriage, for my day-to-day. And then he prayed for me. (this may have been the deal-breaker) And I shook his hand, and I left.

I clutched the water bottle his assistant had offered and the folded pamphlet, and when I skipped down the steps, something came over me and before I knew it I had swooped down behind the building and dropped it into a bush. When I got to Pat's house, I stuck the water bottle between two branches of a tree; I was afraid he would recognize it, and see the prayer like a cloud around my features and I was ashamed.

I said I'd take him to coffee and he asked me, "Where? The one on campus, or the Tully's?" And I thought about it for a while. The coffee on campus: amongst clicking lap tops and thick text books and chattering classmates. "Tully's," I said.

At the coffee shop I told him why I was on campus. "Oh," he said, "So I suppose you want me to get the folder?" I smiled sheepishly, and couldn't help remembering: In our second year at Greenville we took a class together Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. One Tuesday I got to class early, said hello to Pat and dumped my stuff on the chair beside his, then ran outside to meet the guy with whom I was currently enduring a dissolving relationship. We spoke for several minutes, and then yelled and fought and in the end, I never made it back to class. When the hour was up, too embarrassed to return to class to retrieve my things, I headed straight to track practice to stretch with the team. A few minutes before we hit the pavement, Patrick pulled open the doors of the Rec Center, holding my bag and coat.

"Sure," I said, sighing a grin. "That would be nice."

And so its done, and I won't be going to school after all. In some ways I am quite sad, but in other ways I know its right. Greenville was such a special time for me, but it was never forced, and I was always present. And now I strive to continue that trend by being present in my current situation, which is this: running from neighborhood to neighborhood, this colossal question mark slung over my shoulders- for the moment, my only cross to bear.

Reasons to be (vegan)

2010-01-16T14:34:00.000-08:00

Two weeks of eating vegan, and I'm feeling a little loopy. I keep passing Auntie Anne's pretzel shop and Pagliacci's Pizza, and a buzzing starts in my head: like this whole foods initiative is ludicrous, our society just doesn't eat like this, I will be shut out of every social occasion and what do vegans ever even eat anyway?!

celery, hemp flour, flax, quinoa, mango, and a million bananas...

But then I pick up the book that started this out in the first place, Thrive: The vegan Nutrition Guide by Brendan Brazier, and I remind myself that eating whole foods isn't just good for me; its good for everybody.

Brazier, by the way, is a professional Ironman Triathlete, a feat I could only begin to imagine after having run a marathon myself, as an Ironman includes but is not limited to the typical 26.2 mile foot-race. Add several hours of biking and swimming and you've got your guy. And this is the stuff that he eats: This insanely expensive hemp oil, agave, sea vegetables like dulse and nori, "pies" made of sunflower seeds and dates, "pizzas" made of sweet potatoes and beets, and muffins stuffed with millet. To top it off, his thesis generally states that the refined foods we consume as an alternative to his wacky diet stress our bodies to a point of sickness: we can't sleep, we crave stimulants instead of nutrients, we are ill or gain weight or feel depressed and disoriented. As someone who does not enjoy feeling disoriented and would like to run a marathon with greater ease, why the hell not throw a little ground flax in my cereal? I've even convinced Patrick (who has loved millet since his four-month stay in Russia) that sprouting quinoa on a napkin can be fun.

Add this to the environmental perks: approx. 30% less energy used to maintain a plant-based diet, and you really can't go wrong. Refinement is fine when it comes to dinner parties. But for now, for me, I'm giving it a rest.

And I really did have the most delicious pizza last night: sweet potato, sesame seeds, chickpea flour, coconut oil, garlic, basil, and sea salt in a food processor for the crust. Tomato, onion, bell pepper, beet, green onion and oregano for the topping and an incredible marinara sauce. Please ask for the recipes, or better yet, pick up a copy of the book...

Epiphany, part I

2010-01-12T01:48:00.000-08:00

After some wonderful time with my family I'm back to real life, and it seems a wedding is looming before us all. Whose, I'm not sure. Nothing is clear, not yet.

While I know I want the marriage (which is to say, I want it much of the time), the hooplah can just feel so unnecessary sometimes. Like, I do love to throw a good party, but does it really have to be about us? And I suppose the answer is yes, the "us" that encircles my reality anyway, the "us" that is my parents, and dear grandparents and sweet friends of all sizes. But there is something else significant happening here, and I know that also.

Like for one, my sister is having a baby. An event so huge and transformative I feel silly thinking about invitations and outfits at all. But I know also we all love silly and so I've somehow tricked Christy into going wedding dress shopping with me on Wednesday. Once I find some cash.

The point is, life ka-thumps onward- even though you've always been much wiser than this, a small, idiotic part of you still thinks getting married will be this very interesting turning point in your life, but its not. Pat still has school and we still struggle to find time and space in which to connect. I still spend long afternoons looking for a hobby; Christy made it into Oxford, and is making plans to sell our beloved piano and leaving her Gilmore Girls to me (hurrah!). A co-worker of mine has passed away and tomorrow at noon I meet my friends to head to his funeral. Dear friends of mine are engaged. I'm training for the marathon, and have been flirting with going vegan.

Oh, my God, I've never needed a slice of Old Amsterdam more. Thank the powers that beer is made of plants; I'm starving for some comfort.

The hour is too late; the lights keep flickering. I can hear rain and merrymakers on my roof. They're singing in unison, and somewhere a radio blares bass that is so far from here I can only feel it in the pillow that rests between my back and the wall. Tonight everything in my life feels large and close like a dream. I wonder if the doors rattle every night in the witching hour or only if I'm awake to hear it.

I think about our baby, a fuzzy little peach, about my co-worker who has finally finished the race, the contents of my room: the orange scarf, the wicker chair, that Boston cap, a painting of a church, a spoon, a light, a map, a bowl. My friends that line the wall above my bed: Ron, Ginny, Hermione, Luna.

Oh Santa, Baby!

2009-12-22T20:27:00.000-08:00

I'm having a Charlie Brown Christmas. I'm losing my faith, and the feeling is all too familiar. In fact I called my mom today on my lunch break at 11am, having heard "We Need A Little Christmas" at least three times since the store opened at 8. "Mom!" I cried, "Santa's not even real! Macy's made him." She was silent for several moments. "Kristin," she told me, "have I mentioned how thrilled we'll be to have you home for a few days?" Now there's a saint if I've ever known one.

It all started the weekend of the feast of St. Nicholas. Pat's school had a huge Christmas party that Friday on their campus, but he was two papers into the 6-paper home stretch, and so naturally, I went alone. (I once heard a fellow classmate gripe, 'Why do they always schedule Christmas right in the middle of finals?!?') However, I did meet up with a friend while I was there who goes to my church, St. Paul's and also happens to be an alumnus of Patrick's university. "They do this every year!" he trilled. And it was quite a sight to behold: tents and tables full of hot chocolate, face-paints, and cookie decorating, multi-colored spot-lights illuminating a stage upon which several bands played various Christmas melodies. People everywhere wearing wacky costumes: Santa hats, pajamas, those old puff-ball Christmas sweaters that were embarrassing in high school but are somehow cool this year. My friend beamed like a six-year old, his smile caught in the glow of a giant white-light Christmas tree reaching nearly thirty feet in the air. "This is Christmas!" he told me, and having never celebrated the holiday with gifts or hullabaloo in his home growing up, I can see that this is true. He looks at the puff-ball-sweater-clad crowd and sees something he can't quite name or explain, and yet it feels sweet and true. It is as much about mystery to him as it is to one who, like me, grew up with the thrilling mixture of fear and feverish pleasure that the same dead bolt I desperately prayed would hold fast every other night of the year would somehow this night give way to an old, overweight man who- God only knows how- knew precisely how to gift me with perfect joy. Even now as I glance into my living room and see the lights winking on my tree I feel a thrill of joy mixed with fear in my stomach. Oh Santy.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

It was this Friday night that I thought on behalf of my friend, 'What is Christmas?' If a thousand songs don't immediately pop into your head at this question, I'd say you are one of the lucky few who has missed the onslaught of overplayed Christmas smut piped from some holiday muzak factory into millions of shops, malls and grocery stores all over. Called to my mind are stories like Charlie Brown's. In his self-titled Christmas film, he spends the week before the big day asking each of his friends for the real meaning of the holiday, constantly wondering when and why it has gone so commercial. In the end, someone reads him "the Christmas story" from Luke, and his heart blooms with peace. Ah, the real meaning.

But as I look towards my wonderful non-religious friends this holiday season, I see a crowd of merry-makers who find that their Christmas joy leads them far from the manger. And I don't think the story of the shepherds and the baby is the one I'm looking for. What defines the experience of the non-religious? The lights, the chocolate, the music: (in the words of the Tim Burton's Jack, Pumpkin King) What IS this? Why are we here? And why do we sell six varieties of miniature trees and spice nog cakes and Christmas hams?

That Sunday St. Nicholas- donning liturgical robes and carrying a staff- processed down the aisle at our church and we all snickered at the false pomp of this 'visiting saint' and saluted him by standing and scooting our kids down the aisle after him to receive oranges and tiny cakes. That's when it hit me. Christmas may be the time in the church year that we Christians carve out to think about God's entry into our humanity, but how it functions on the world outside is something very different. And on that Sunday morning, I had the sneaking suspicion that it started with that old man carrying a staff and a basket of oranges.

So I've done a little reading and the results have been enlightening. St. Nicholas, as it turns out, is most famous for his gift, not of oranges, but of bags of gold to a family so poor that they could only hope to sell their daughters into prostitution. In order to avoid this damning act, Old St. Nick left bags of a gold on their doorsteps to use as a dowries for their weddings instead. That's it. That's the whole story.

And though I spent a few scary hours this morning convinced that Macy's created the rest, further reading has allowed me to accept that all the charming details surrounding the Santa Claus myth have evolved quite naturally over time, pin-balling between artists, poets, and yes, advertising agencies, but for the most part similar to the evolution of a great many mythical figures of our culture. And yet it is hard to deny that Santa as mainly grown up and out, sinisterly reflecting the more embarrassing of our 21st century values. How did this gift to those in desperate need translate to the piles of packages awaiting the child Christmas morning, typified by the media? And, by the way, when's the last time you received a bag of gold?

Growing up Christian, I had an easy time of it. I could spend December thinking of my birthday and obsessing over our family traditions and then let myself get caught up in the story of Jesus and the manger and those angels and shepherds, tear up a little at the thought of the Incarnation and then go back to basking in the brilliance of sweet familial glow. When I first started questioning my Christian roots in college, my experience of Christmas obviously shifted in some minor ways. But now something catastrophic has occurred: I'm losing my faith in Santa! And finding it, on the whole, a death much more difficult to manage.

Now turning to another childhood companion, I hear my worries voiced in the character of Big Bird in 'Christmas Eve on Sesame Street' who earnestly fears that without his understanding of Santa's ability to fit down a chimney, the actual task of fitting down a chimney will not be possible. After exhausting his best attempts at research (with the aid of kermit, oscar and a slew of adorable kindergarteners who offer their wisdom), Big Bird decides to solve the problem of Santa's physical inability to fit in a chimney not by helping him, but by watching him do it! Ah, Big Bird is a lot like me; you see, for him it is his own understanding that is the condition of possibility. I take comfort in knowing that I am in good company.

In the end, Big Bird falls asleep and wakes up furious with himself for missing the big show. Devastated he returns in doors only to find that Santa has still come somehow and that his friends and family are all around to bear witness: not to the feat but to the joy of being safe and together at Christmas.

So here's to hoping that like Big Bird I can take the time for a mental nap this holiday season and find that, in the end, the magic of Santa, the kindness of St. Nicholas and the joy of togetherness and family somehow squeeze themselves into my small experience of Christmas even if I can't see or understand how.

Revisioning the World Outside

2009-12-01T18:22:00.000-08:00

Two eggnog lattes from Allegro's, two days in a row, and something weird is happening in my head and in my closet. I've started digging: specifically, at my old college binders. I once lamented that when college finally ended, all that I would really have to show for it would be these flimsy little folders- now that I've rediscovered them, however, they seem quite adequate, in fact a little overwhelming if truth be told.

So many wild, obsessive feelings I charged through, belting my findings to anyone who would stand still. I wrote a piece of creative nonfiction almost every semester, a tedious blow-by-blow commentary of my world of faith and life, all my doubts about religion and my woundedness re: old boyfriends, well-meaning professors, the godhead, etc, etc...

And journals! Five my sophomore year alone! And I only started December first. Which is today, four years ago. Amazing.

As I skim through it all, I can't help but wonder what has changed. Of course, I'm still spilling my guts and sloughing through my faith and feelings. I have become a teensy bit less religious, but I have also become a teensy bit less engaged also, so its quite hard to know for sure.

In October of my senior year, 2007, I visited a monastery and had to write a paper about it. My eyes were immediately drawn to that particular piece simply because of my recent (and bizarre?!?!) longing to join up as quickly as possible. But, surprise. I write:

"In many ways, the monastic life is drastically uncomfortable for a young female student like me. I am fascinated by their historic emergence, and intrigued by the ascetic lifestyle, but I am also bothered and muddled with unbidden visceral response: confusion, envy, resentment, and also a curious desire to belong. I have found existence on the outside to be troublesome, often rocky, always chaotic, but richly rewarding and graceful above and over all things: authentic at the very least. The cloistered life of the monks, however, feels safe, too safe and my skin prickles each time I hear them talking about their calling to 'come apart' from the world, to change their names, to exchange their goods and to don the cloaks and habits that mark their separation."

This passage makes me feel about myself the way one might feel about an elderly family member who keeps forgetting your name. Dear old thing, you might think and pat her sweetly on the head. What business did I have summing up "life on the outside" as if there is a homogeneous non-monk experience? No wonder I found life "troublesome, chaotic, but richly rewarding and... authentic..." I lived in a tiny college town, for crying out loud, in southern IL in a cornfield. I never drank; I hardly knew anyone who did. 90% of the people I interacted with on a daily basis believed the same basic things I did about the world. And I was skeptical of the monastery!! As if my place wasn't just as safe!

And now, in this big crazy (is it even that big?) city, alone as a fish in an aquarium, I can't help but ask, what the devil is so bad about being safe? Bring on the cloisters! Bring on the bells!

I used to weigh the merits of a life lived within the rhythms of prayers. Sure, its good for you to attend morning, afternoon and evening prayer, I thought to myself. It keeps you safe from the tendency to forget about God or forget about those who are in need. It reminds you of what you believe in; it reminds you of things you should do. But now something very different tugs at my subconscious and causes me to long for prayer with my entire being. What I didn't understand in college is that life is not safe- but not because you might die or get so sad that you curse God or break the law. Life is unsafe because all you really have to do is try and pay the bills and get some food and sleep. You can so easily stumble from place to place, seek your comfort, and watch the years pound on and on and on. Hobbies, skills, people to meet at parties, these are all wonderful things. But we are more than comfort-seekers as human beings; we are meaning-makers also.

I'm not necessarily talking about our specific Christian religious stuff: there is a God, and that's how the world was made, etc. I'm referring to the most foundational of meanings, for example: the sun at this particular position means its morning; this morning means its Sunday; this Sunday is Easter Sunday. Without order of some sort, I've learned firsthand that morning can be noon- it can be 4AM. Thursday can be 'your Sunday,' and Easter is just another day to bump up our orders at the grocery store. I'm not trying to say that Christianity is the only means through which to make meaning of our time or that working at the store is not a noble, fine profession. But I have discovered that these are the central issues at work when I miss prayer or the rhythms of my life throughout college. And I love and miss Christianity for this same very odd reason: because it saves you from floating, working just to pay (and sometimes not pay) your loans, electricity and rent, and then coming home to crash until work requires you show up again.

I want to act as if I believe work is valuable in and of itself, whether I'm on the track or cleaning shelves or coaching with Girls on the Run. So I'm reconsidering how I see her now. I'm thinking about grad school, and I'm not putting away those old flimsy folders just yet...

No-sleep November

2009-11-29T00:23:00.001-08:00

So I guess I'll follow my October post by saying that this month has been particularly dissatisfying.

The wondrous melancholy; the wondrous now.

First off, the grocery store has had the fabulous idea to open its doors at a squinty-eyed-8am instead of the luxurious, bountiful 9am we once enjoyed. As a customer, I am happy at this change- no more Safeway milk and eggs before church. As an employee, I am scandalized. There is no way to do four hours of work in three hours, especially when this work is accomplished by over ten bodies. And adding more bodies to the equation just does not equal the hour we've lost. The brainstorming committee (did one even ever exist??) forgot to factor in the small spaces and tight corners of our store that- one would imagine they've forgotten this tiny glitch- are growing ever smaller with the coming of Christmas.

There are other small things that have made November terrible: the tight funds, the ever-expanding dark hours (starting at a very wakeful 4:30pm with almost an entire month to go), squabbles amongst loved ones, etc... but perhaps the most terrible of all has been that horrible sensation that everything is wrong when in fact nothing has really happened at all.

There have been no major catastrophes. We managed to navigate an almost entirely pain-free thanksgiving dinner: stellar menu and sweet company. Pat and I got engaged; I am able (somehow!) to pay my rent; Christy, Laura and I saw New Moon north of the city while sipping beers and passing popcorn around, and I've even managed to go a whole week (except for thanksgiving day of course, and one particular pie post-turkey-day) without sugar or missing a day of running. I've even worked in an abs routine.

So this does not explain the nights I can't sleep I feel so generally unfulfilled. I feel as if I have missed a lily pad somewhere along the way. I ignored an open door, and now here I am, floating and I can't tell which way is up. I wake up in the morning, and my heart immediately finds rock bottom. What is the point, I think tiredly, of waking up or of falling back to sleep? I feel out of my own body, sick with anxiety and find horrible, sharp, irritated things coming out of my mouth- when the truth is that the person I am most irritated with is myself.

I don't believe in restlessness; I believe in content, in living within your means, in finding, enabling and pursuing your own routine. I keep picking up The Cloister Walk and swimming in Kathleen Norris' stories of living at the monastery. I am up to my ears with envy, wishing I could be somewhere something already functions whether or not I show up, whether or not I find the energy to shoulder the weight. I miss college and my home growing up, but not for the virtues of these particular institutions, but instead for my place within them. In these places I have taken off the cloak of otherness and basked instead in the giant warmth of familiarity. These places were my refuge from loneliness, anxiety, and frustration. In her book, Norris relinquishes 'otherness' within the walls of the church. I don't know if this will ever be possible for me. But I do hope for hope.

Which is appropriate given the time of year now inhabited on this new 29th day of November, finally on its way out. Advent.

Rock-tober

2009-11-23T21:49:00.000-08:00

I'd just like to pay a little tribute to October, which was an awesome month this year. And it seems important to note that I have always sort of felt about October the way I feel about doing laundry: I know its necessary, but I'll probably just feel better when its over. I don't exactly know why- November just seems so festive, and September has more to do with school and summer than the following months. October is just something to get through- and halloween (the constant worry that I'm not creative or clever or handy enough to come up with a somehow-both-stunning-and-witty costume) another obligatory holiday leading up to those lovely, plump warm days: Thanksgiving, which I always feel at some point is my favorite holiday until Christmas comes around, toting along with it the charms and attention of my wintry birthday.

But this year October kicked September's ass. My dear friend,who also happens to be my sister, Erin came into town and we romped our way through Seattle, spending entire days walking in the slanting sun-- back when the light lasted all the way until 7...

Then Christy and I went to Forks- we just threw a lunch together, packed our rain gear and optimism and hopped in the car. It was a drive, a ferry ride, and another couple hours in the car, which we spent reading and laughing, and then stopped to take a few pictures. We ate lunch on the beach and then walked around the small town, making a few choice stops purely to witness the booming new businesses...

And then just when you might think the month was wrapping up, my mom came into town and I finally got to show someone all my favorite running spots. We made three kinds of hummus and bought Quark at the Farmer's Market. While she was here, I started my painting lessons and felt for the first time the release of standing all afternoon at my kitchen table with a brush in my hand, pulling colors here and there, and finding out just how much I never knew before.

And it is drizzly now, and gets dark at quarter to five (with about a month to go before the solstice), and quiet and evenings seem to drag on forever. I keep vitamin D in the back pocket of my blue jeans; I keep the phone near by. But sometimes the dark is merely darkness, just what it ought to be on the cusp of December. I'm finding myself grateful.

So thanks October, for being just what you were supposed to be also: brilliant, sun-filled, orange, red, golden, clean, cold.

The word is out

2009-11-13T21:14:00.000-08:00

The first person to notice that I am engaged who wasn't in on the whole shenanagan in the first place is named Molly. She is four.

Today we sat eating a snack at the miniature tables the preschool seems full of. My hands were folded across my giant knees, towering above her eating surface.

"I just love your ring!" she told me, like we were sitting on stools at a cocktail bar already on our second round. "Oh, thanks," I responded, flattered but shy.

"Why are you wearing that?" she asked with sweet innocence. It's a social symbol she doesn't yet recognize and for some reason I was a tiny bit jealous. I thought for a minute about her question, then answered, "Because someone gave it to me." Which seemed to satisfy her, and then we talked about Halloween and she spooned applesauce into her mouth. I leaned my head out the doorway and pretended to order our third round.

I'd still take the coffee

2009-10-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

I am once again at a point in my life where belief in God is scarce, not as something I have lost sight of or turned against, but has become irrelevant, like a project fretted about in sophomore year biology. This is not the first time I've encountered spiritual difference from those nearby, but certainly is the first indifference, not wounded by, but merely separated from the community I love whom I experience as The Church. It doesn't sting like it did in college, and I don't feel heavy with the weight of sticking up for the voices and people I love in a context I find suffocating as I once did.

I remember one day at my college chapel (which I miss dearly and think of with fondness especially as the leaves change this year) listening to a rather fiery sermon. It was raining outside, a grey, persistent kind of thing, but uncomfortably stuffy inside, or perhaps it was the pastor's bold invitation to step up in our generation and stand accountable and furthermore to be present and engaged spiritually in that very moment or to get up and leave. There in the middle of the sour-smelling dampness and the loud bright words piped from the microphones and through the speakers hanging from the walls, I walked out. And I found a surprisingly pleasant, almost amused feeling blossoming in my chest. I didn't feel rebellious; I felt relieved. I walked out of the heavy damp, and into the drizzling, breezy air and inhaled. If God is anywhere, God is here, too, I remember thinking and bought myself a cup of coffee to savor.

That day I might have walked onto the streets of Seattle, land of eternal breezy, drizzly openness and a million cups of coffee. I am in no way attempting to glorify this city as a spiritual haven; even here in a liberal paradise, appropriately rare are those who care truly for The Other, especially if that other is a Christian or misses Sarah Palin. Rather that Seattle has been a place of spiritual rest for me and that I've been crisis-free (spiritually, that is) for almost a year now. So here we are.

I have, however, been more consistently anxious and depressed. If you are a Christian, you might be tempted to draw some quick conclusions, but I immediately look elsewhere to determine why I'm 'off'. And whether or not I identify as a follower of anything but the seasons, I don't choose to draw any conclusions at all. Nothing is for certain.

That's why it was a pleasant surprise to stumble across Kathleen Norris' Cloister Walk this morning, and reflect over the year that I've been here and the changes that have taken place in my day-to-day life. Cloister Walk is, as far as I can tell so far, a personal account of one woman's stay at a monastery and how it shaped her routine and thus her outlook on the rest of life. Even the first several pages read like a song, and I drank it like wine (that is, slowly to savor, of course). It's hard to make sense of; I read the psalms feeling cheap, hear the words of of Scripture told in a sermon and think: I'm over it. But for the first time in my life, I read the order for a monastic life and it looks like that rainy street, a window out of my anxiety. A routine in which work, study and play are intrinsically good. Just something to ponder this weekend.

I got called in to sub at a preschool today. Did I ever mention that? I got hired as a sub. Its something to start with- And we sit inside under multi-colored twinkle lights wearing slippers and baking bread, and then don our galoshes and hats to build pirate ships in the rain.

Permission to say something totally boring?

2009-09-25T19:09:00.000-07:00

I just got off work. I clocked in at 9 this morning and haven't thought about anything else since but this intrinsically fabulous thing: five o'clock. At five I'll be able to, I don't know, eat what I want, watch television, stare at the wall if I choose, make a phone call? Mail a letter, organize my bills, clean my room, or-- ???

Christy read something the other day about work and I can't stop thinking about it. Why is it so boring to us or so awful? Sure I am not particularly thrilled with my job. Fine. Sure I'd rather be riding a jeep around Africa taking pictures and writing about my culture shock. Who wouldn't? But since I'm not there, and since there's no where else I can be between the time I clock in and the time I snap off my name tag and walk through the sliding doors, hadn't I better just relax?

I hear it all day long: “Do _______. It makes the time go faster!” or “I hate ________! It makes time go so slow.” And of course I say it too, and I think about it all day, and it positively rules me. I want to cram the hours into a shredder or space out into complete oblivion. But today for some reason a small miraculous voice in my head reported the bleak calculation that I spend over thirty hours a week (and this is quite optimistic) wishing the time in which I am living didn't exist. Think about this for a moment. What is reality but time?

Ah, but this particular time is not my reality, you say. This time is not me. What I truly am is a biker/banker/philanthropist-gardener/listener/lover/computer nerd. Well, okay. And maybe it really is so. But a job is a job is a job, and earning the money may be merely the means to an end, but it is (hopefully, unless you pay your rent with buttons and pocket lint like I do) a forty-hour means. And this deserves consideration.

Why is 'shop talk' taboo again? I just spent eight hours there. I'm not talking she-said-he-said, but you know, the stuff. When I'm at work my mind is a whirling file of expiration dates and case labels. I know the prices of at least a dozen products including the SKU for a bag of lemons which is, by the way 00917827 and rings up at 1.39. I think about hummus (garlic); I know what case it comes in (about the size of a Asics shoe box); when it expires (10/09/09); when it is delivered (4am, seven days a week). This IS my day. And when I come home at five, this is why I don't remember anything I've done: because (other than one's closest friends who are of course, exempt from most of this discussion because you talk about this sort of stuff anyway) people just don't ask me what its like, what the stuff has been, and I'm too ashamed to say so. Why?, you ask. And its a great question. But isn't the answer obvious?

Because its boring as hell.

And this is true; no one will argue. But something about it still nags at me. The statement that work is 'boring' or that the stuff of my day isn't worth talking about when I get home is the result of an assumption that what I say must, as a general rule, be exciting and as an obvious addendum, what I do. What we say to each other must have a flavor of interest, uniqueness and certainly reflect a certain type of identity. You all don't want to hear about my day because, let's face it, it's uninteresting, un-unique and as a bonus, it doesn't have a thing to do with the main event, me!

If I tell you, for example, that I spent the morning organizing spoiled food into banana boxes, and that I got chicken juice on my hands, but still managed to eat my poptart and only got a tiny smudge of Lily pollen on my t-shirt, it would be, sadly, nothing different than most days, nothing of my own importance in the world and far less interesting than nearly getting eaten by a tiger.

But its what I did all day. So what if its not how I choose to spend the time I'm off work? So what if its not a job that defines me? Because when I look back on my life from the unimaginable future at the year when I first moved to Seattle and away from everything I knew, I suspect a great many of my memories will be hitting the alarm at five AM, pulling on a hoodie and staring up at the Dips case, deciding what to pull.

I am all for deep conversation and reading books about concepts. Great, let's do it. It'll change the government and the economy and the way we think about reality and ethics. But I'd like to make a plug for wide conversations also-- it is possible to talk about a little of this and a little of that, which happens to be my day, and doesn't need to be awesome or unique to be true.

Additionally, the truth is that in order for our society to work, a very few of us can have unique, life-defining jobs. The rest of us have to learn to push a broom, count boxes and talk to customers. This is maybe why I love running so much: that I'm constantly overwhelmed with my own presence in the moment, even though my immediate desire is that this moment be over. Its a bewildering, invigorating space between let this end and here I am. We must of course not labor under the delusion that we will change our lives or the lives of those around us. But if we keep doing well what we must keep doing anyway, we do have the overwhelming opportunity to be present in a single moment. Not to love our jobs with reckless abandon. But just to say on any given day, here I am, here I am, here I am.

The Lamenting Virgin

2009-09-15T20:57:00.000-07:00

Sunday I took two buses to get to church early and meet with my priest to talk about getting a job, but I ended up telling her how lonely I am instead. She was unbelievably helpful: a good listener, but to the point, and talked to me about Meyers-Briggs, which I love. In the end she helped me to realize that maybe I'm not crazy for feeling trapped in the grocery store. Maybe I just really do need a job that's less immediate, tactile, and more goal-oriented/intuitive. So I guess that's where I'm headed next; I'm going to reconfigure my resume.

On the way back to the front of the church, I ran into a friend I've only met once before whose wife is home sleeping off an over-night shift at the hospital. He told me hello and that there's a Russian festival in Capitol Hill later and do Pat and I want to go? Which, of course we do, but he's not with me at the moment to ask. I took his card and promised to call.

You see, Pat wasn't with me that morning because he went to the Free-Methodist church instead, the one right by his new house on his new side of town by a new school, a clear sign to me that our relationship is on its way out. And even though we still have plans get married next year, I now find it almost inevitable that we'll also never go to church together, fundamentally disinterest and disappoint each other, and end up estranged and miserable. So after my talk with Mother M. I decided to skip church, and walk through Queen Anne to meet him.

It was a beautiful walk, almost breathtakingly quiet, and the streets were shrubby and quaint, and the sun was shy on my face as I climbed the hill. I thought about how what M. said is true, that finding a job is another full time job and that I just can't waste my energy imagining how and why exactly each job doesn't want me professionally. It's probably nothing personal. (Or else maybe it is. It is possible that I'm stunningly incompetent and write soppy, worthless cover letters. But either way, I guess it makes no difference whether I dwell on it, and I really have no choice but to press on.) Then and there, or else on the way, I somehow stumbled upon the will to go to the grocery store Monday morning with my head held high. And I have to say, the past few days of work have been cheery, even content, something I haven't felt since January.

When I got to the church dizzy and flushed with fresh air, I asked Pat if he would leave me if I become agnostic. He sort of patted my shoulder awkwardly, staring at me with that befuddled look of exasperation and pity I know so well, then said, “Kristin, meet J, my classmate and pastor here at the Free-Methodist church.” I shook her hand and she told me how much she loves Patrick and how smart he is, which I told her I already knew. Later on the bus to Capitol Hill while I was trying to call S, squinting at his business card, I saw Pat shake his head out of the corner of my eye, grinning. “Agnostic,” he said, almost whispering, and put his arm around me.

We both found icons at the Russian festival: Pat's is St. Simeon. Mine is the lamenting virgin. I've only ever seen it in a book before, and I think it is incredible. It is a picture Mary, obviously, and as is typical in an Orthodox painting, she's robed and beautiful with big almond eyes and invisible hair. Her arms are outstretched as if holding the tiny Christ-Man, but in this particular version, he's not there. Mary simply holds out her hands, her head and body leaning to one side, the corner of her eyes turned down in an unmistakable expression of piercing sorrow. She is supposed to represent the words spoken to her by Simeon the first time he sees Jesus, “And a sword shall pierce your heart also.”

I fell in love with it the moment I saw it in Pat's icon book. To me it is a heart-breaking foreshadowing of what humanity faces forever after the death and disappearance of God. This empty longing, this wishing for something we don't even know how to name. The desire not just for a scrap of truth or hope or morality to cling to, but for a body, a piece of flesh, a reIncarnation of the divine.

I couldn't help it. The icon made me think about my job. There is a pitifully similar elusiveness in the longing I feel: I want something I don't even know right now. Not just an idea to carry me through the next eight hour shift, but something I can lay my hands on: something mundane and made of flesh.

The icon is as long as my pinky finger and twice as wide. I tucked it into my pocket and S and his wife convinced us to come along to a friends house, where we were not really sure we were invited. We stopped on the way to buy flavored Triskets and Tillamook cheddar cheese to offer as an apology for crashing their party and headed on over. At first it was strange and awkward and nobody offered us a chair. I was horrified that we'd ruined their evening, and then suddenly everything changed. In an unforeseen turn of events, I wound up in a conversation with the hostess and suddenly we were talking about jobs and religion and our families. And when she and Patrick debate the issue of going to a church where you fit in vs. going to a church where you feel doctrinal tension, I found myself seeing Pat in a new way. I've always just wanted to find a place where I feel known, and where the questions that bother me the most aren't ignored, and I can finally stop appearing cynical and pushy and just relax. But Pat doesn't feel that way at all. Those are his questions you know? And he wants to sit with them through his tangly Methodist roots. And even though I'm still not sure I'll go to church with him ever, I still think he's smart and good.

The conversation turned and the hostess vaguely mentioned that she is in the process of adoption. “Wow!” I said, “That's exciting.” And she nodded, and I found myself a little unsure of what to say next. For some reason I couldn't remember what questions are rude, and which are allowed. “Is it a... long process?” I tried. And she launched easily into an explanation of her agency and how they're not choosing a baby, but waiting to be chosen by parents looking for help. “Oh,” I said, surprised. They're just waiting? There's no timeline? “So... when...?” I asked gingerly, and she smiled sadly and shook her head. “Any day.” She glanced at her husband across the picnic table laughing in the midst of another conversation. “We're just waiting for the phone to ring.”

My head swam with sudden empathy. I knew just how it felt to stare at the phone, willing it to ring. The emptiness, the helplessness. And then my stomach blossomed with shame that I could ever compare our situations at all.

“Its been seven months,” she said quietly. I thougth ruefully of my month of melodrama. “We just have to stop thinking about it every moment,” she went on, smiling, “And enjoy sleeping in while we still can!” We laughed, relieved. A few minutes later it got too dark to see and we exchanged numbers and shook hands and Pat, S, J and I walked to the car. On the way home I unburied my icon of Mary and stared at her arms reaching, the sad tilt of her shoulders, the heaviness reflected in her bright eyes.

On Monday I got up at five fifteen AM and walked to work in the dark with my thumb on her face, clenched tight in my pocket and hoped that the phone would ring.

An unmarked anniversary

2009-09-10T16:06:00.001-07:00

It's been one year this month since I moved to Seattle. The weight of what has happened is so heavy today as I walk around cleaning that I can hardly breathe.

I don't know what I thought would happen if I moved here, but I'm glad I'm not leaving, because it hasn't happened yet.

The quiet unraveling of a friendship I never even expected, the dark, shifting feelings of my own self, the job that I wanted so much, now a reality pressing so heavy that I feel paralyzed.

I apply and apply, but the phone doesn't ring. I know its normal. I know it happens, and they've got a lot to do. But if they knew how much was at stake-- if they knew it was the difference between forward and no where at all--

???

I guess if they knew the kind of lunatic I've been this week, crazy with my desire for something pressing and structured in my days, they'd have even less reason to pick up the phone.

Still Broke(n)

2009-09-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

Right after it happened, I heroicly emailed my ex-prospective employer and asked, very dignifiedly I think, if there is anything I can do to interview better in the future. Even though I thought the email had a distinctly business-like tenor, she responded with less help for the savvy working woman in me and more comfort to the pathetic sap who stayed up till three and woke again at 7:30 to think about being alone for the rest of her life.

"Don't worry!" she cooed. She is, after all, a preschool teacher. "You did fine! It was nothing you did wrong at all!" And "Good luck to you! You did great!" Smiley face, exclamation point, smiley face. Jesus, could she hear me weeping? But it was kind, and very generous of her to take the time to write to me at all.

Even though I would have been pissed as hell if she didn't.

But she did tell me something that will help. The individual they did hire, she said, has a minor in music and can wear two hats for the program. This sort of snapped me back to my senses. I have to start selling myself! (End boyfriend/lover analogy HERE.) I am great at music, as a general, preschool-level skill, and I guess my resume doesn't say so. I was a band freak in high school (this is one step beyond geek), and I led music at Girl Scout camp all the time. Why, when she asked me what I'd bring to the program, did I ramble on and on about how I think kids need more than the love of a teacher, and that individuals should be taught in individual ways? I never thought to say, "I am great at music, and would be comfortable singing with the kids." And now I will. So thank you, heart-break. You've taught me yet another lesson.

* * *

My Stages of Grief

1. Crying
2. Splurging
3. Hibernating
4. Eating Cereal in Bed (this constitutes an entire, separate stage, independent of #2)
5. Solitude or Running
6. Writing

The Break Up

2009-09-04T00:07:00.000-07:00

Christy is always telling me that applying for jobs is just like hanging out with a new boyfriend. To which I of course reply with vehement disagreement.

"No, its not," I sigh impatiently, "and we've been through this. You can call the job you want as many times as you want and its not needy; its determined." And I always believed this was true. Until today at 4:16, when I was dumped.

By a preschool.

And suddenly I'm back in college, freshman year, huddled on the floor of my dorm with my roommate, eating microwave Easy-Mac at twelve in the morning, hysterical laughter spilling over the throb that sits right behind my soft pallet, tickling my throat, the corners of my mouth, tempting me to give into the tears and the grief and the loss. Why, why, why

As it was then, its not the actual lost thing that represents the first prickly wave of grief. It is instead an overwhelming sense that one's life is now somehow less organized and meaningful. I am familiar with this notion, and I've always resented it because I don't believe it is true; I am convinced that life is powerful and wonderful and necessary with or without a mate. Yes, everyone needs The Other, deeply, complexly, compellingly. But the other, the lover? Optional.

But this evening as I sit sifting through my thoughts about the job, I realize that its not the particular lover that is at the heart of the loss; it is the trajectory this one represents, or has represented- the sense that one has momentum. And with the loss of this direction, the infinite alternatives sprawling ahead are too paralyzing and lonely to compel the adventurer you once were. The first pain, I realize tonight, is the loss of your own identity and motion. And as a result, the particular specifics of one's loss isn't really immediately felt. That, unfortunately, comes much later. Because of this, sometimes it is less painful than it initially seems to be. Sometimes it is worse.

I imagine in this case it will be much easier than it feels now. To be honest, I knew about the preschool for less than 48 hours, only waited thirty hours in between the interview and the actual break-up. But they were a beautiful thirty hours, filled with plans: how can you not? Budget configurations, many phone conversations with my enthusiastic mom, a new schedule drawn up, a decision to buy a bike, vision after vision after vision of myself: peddling to work, talking to the kids, seeing them later at the grocery store, little by little regaining the self-worth I've laid to rest working at a job where I feel less than myself.

So tonight I will do what I've done before: buy a huge tub of chocolate ice cream and watch Gilmore Girls. Erase my new budget, schedule, spend the money set aside for the bike on something pretty and useless. And maybe tomorrow when I wake up at God knows when, I'll have the energy to make my bed and take a shower. Maybe I'll even make a few phone calls.

Then again, maybe not.

A Question to say 'Yes' to

2009-08-24T18:45:00.001-07:00

Since the marathon I’ve been spending my long afternoons at home, alone, watching Scrubs reruns and peeling slivers of string cheese. Today was no exception, except I felt worse. I hate my job, and I work at five or six in the morning and there’s nothing worse than waking up at four and preparing yourself for something you feel terrible doing, but aren’t able to change. I try to think of things I wouldn’t mind doing at this time of day: family bike rides maybe, a nice long workout, a good day of hiking; certainly not transferring frozen bags of pasta from frozen cases to frozen shelves while The Chiffons bleat in my ears beneath the fluorescent glare. Twice a week I find myself sitting on the floor of the bathroom at work, biting my arm to stifle the noise of my sobs as hot tears trickle down my cheeks. Its not fair that I have to work somewhere I hate. I moved to Seattle with my freshly printed diploma tucked under my arm, feeling that it guaranteed me something stellar and bright for the future. And I ended up in a grocery store.

So today I got to the part in the series where Turk asks Carla to marry him and she says, “I don’t know,” which really floors him and he’s just sort of dumbfounded and ego-struck for a while. After about fifteen minutes of the show, however, he tries a new tactic, and asks her several times a day. Each time she says, “I don’t know,” and each time he seems only more determined. But eventually something in him seems to snap, and her indecision actually wounds him a little, so he walks away; finally, in the last two minutes of the episode, she comes to her senses and decides she’s ready to commit. She calls him on the phone and says simply, “Ask me again.” And he hangs up the phone, drops what he’s doing and runs across town. As the camera pans out, they meet in a park, at which point music begins to play and the viewer only sees Turk bend on one knee, Carla nod her head, and J.D. run in with sparklers to zoom around them while they kiss. The song that drowns out the unnecessary dialogue is by Rhett Miller, called, “Question.” One line of the song goes:

Someday somebody’s gonna ask you
A question that you should say yes to

Its obviously a song written about engagement, and romance, but the words that hung in the air long after I stared at the blank screen didn’t remind me of getting engaged (an idea that is- admittedly- on my mind more and more these days), I wasn’t even thinking about Pat at all. I was thinking about the Eucharist.

If there’s a hinge question in my life right now, a question that I should say yes to, its probably something practical like, ‘Will you ever stick to your bleeping budget?’ or ‘Will you stop nagging Pat about leaving his stuff around your house?’ I’m not really feeling anxious about religion at this precise moment. There’s just not really a crisis right now, oddly enough. So it surprised me today when I felt this great surge of emotion in my chest at the thought of saying yes to God. I wanted it; I wanted to say yes.

Patrick had left for work several hours before. On his way out the door he realized he’d forgotten to take off the ring I gave him for Christmas last year, a ring that we worked on engraving together. The words printed around the outside are essentially the invitation to communion from the liturgy. Since he didn’t want to take it to the grocery store with him, I’ve had it on my finger all night, and it seems fitting to wear a ring this particular night that speaks a proposition. Every once in a while I move it from my right hand to my left, and I stare at it, and I keep wondering if it will make me kinder to him, more patient, a wife. It seems somehow both appropriate and confusing that the ring feels like something between my answer to God and an engagement ring.

Does a ring make you a good person, or the love of running, a runner? Will my surge of emotion, the yes that sits ripe in my chest make me a Christian, a real living, breathing model? I felt something akin to my high school enthusiasm, the version of me that wanted to run to the center of town and just feel something, just do something about the way that I feel, and to just be a Christian in that moment.

But it didn’t last in high school, and I know it won’t last tonight. To be a Christian, you can’t just feel something, or even tell someone else you feel it. The question isn’t, “What do you feel that has allowed you a moment to say ‘Yes’?”, but instead, “How will you live in light of the ‘Yes’?” How will I live in light of my encounter, the moment I was asked the question and found some miracle within me that allowed me to answer in the affirmative and survive to tell the tale, now nourished and sent forth?

But my moment of elated puzzlement only lasted for one lovely, ignorant moment, and then it burst like a soap bubble

I already knew the answer. Its was clear as day, and I’ve probably known it all along:
I have to go to work. I have to do my job.

And okay, there’s probably nothing wrong with searching for another job, or working on my resume, but when I wake up at five this Tuesday morning, I’m going to have to spend the next eight hours at the grocery store, and I might as well appreciate my job, not for the store or the company or for the mighty beast, capitalism. But because its work. And it’s the work I have- at the moment- been given to say yes to.

Road again

2009-07-05T11:34:00.000-07:00

I went to the Food Bank on Thursday morning and picking up food donations with K. she told me, "Kristin, I can't believe you haven't run since the marathon. That's gotta be stressing you out." And I have to say, I was quite surprised. I still feel somewhat heroic for what I did, despite my roller coaster of self-pity, and it caught me off-guard to hear someone say that I should get off my butt and hit the roads again when I feel so deserving of a break. But maybe she's right, that its emotionally stressing me out, so I got off my butt.

For about four miles, but it still felt wonderful-- not my legs, of course-- but really wonderful, you know? I got to University bridge and- it was boiling hot- there were boats really simply everywhere below and the air sat heavy around me like a coat covering my bare arms, but I just sunk into it, and it felt like a bath full of epsom salts. I looked out at the loungers on the back of motor boats or the adventurous kayak-ers in their life jackets, drinking from sport-top water bottles, and I just felt like the luckiest. Maybe not the one having the most fun, or the best off in that weather, but the luckiest-- just to be a witness to life, to Seattle, even to myself. It felt good to be able to count on Running again, for it just to sit below my heart, locked in my machine-knees while my head marched through a litany of thoughts, piecing ideas together, processing motion, change and the desire to stay still and throw down roots.

Small steps...

2009-06-30T18:47:00.001-07:00

I am in a state of numbness about running. Unfortunately, my legs are not. It still hurts to bend and stand and lift heavy crates of lettuce, which I have to do a lot at the store. My running partner, C. is not sore, which is fine, but it doesn't change the fact that I am. Why, though?

I want to walk my old running routes-- like the two weeks between cross country and track in college, when I missed it so much I couldn't stay away-- and think about my life and try to understand why seasons change and things die, but I can't. Short walks tire me out. I miss running; I miss races, but I don't want either of them right now. I have this terrific feeling that running is all at once everything and nothing to me. That it still defines me, is almost closer than my name, but still I hate it. Why didn't anyone tell me that a marathon is the slow, torturous version of a truck hitting your whole body?

On Sunday Pat and I sat out side the library on the grass with two bowls of ice cream and a notebook and made a list of pros and cons to help him decide if he should go to grad school (he got accepted the night before the race). Though both lists were a fair size before we called it a day, in the end all we could really see on the 'con' side is the money thing and the family thing. I miss my family, and I don't want to be in debt, but weighing on the other side were massive things like community, vocational direction, and the fact that we will stay in Seattle, which I also love. And its only three years, after all. Not a decade, not a lifetime. After a few moments silence while we both stared off into space, Pat looked at me with a grin shyly forming and asked, "Well, Kristin, what do you think?" I thought for a minute.

"I think I'm going to run another marathon," I said. Which he said he already knew.

So yesterday we caught the 30 to the campus and walked around a little bit after he turned in his intent-to-enroll paperwork. So that's it. Pat's a student again! Which has inspired me to get my own proverbial shit together and start perusing Craigslist for a teaching job. Just a couple months now left of freedom before Pat moves and embarks on a task which could very well send a new wave of stress into our relationship, but I really couldn't be more excited.

Where moment meets eternity

2009-06-28T12:53:00.001-07:00

So why can't I describe the way I feel about it?

It's been all I've been thinking about for six months. Or even longer: since I was twelve and Mom dragged us downtown early one sunday morning, and I watched the Kenyans speed by with something in their eyes that I didn't understand, or that lady with the tiny veil, running right next to the man with a matching t-shirt, proclaiming, "Just married." All those smiling faces parading past, all running towards something I couldn't see or didn't know, just knew that I wanted to work for it, too.

And I have! I have for so long. Every humiliating, dog-tired day of cross country in college, every terrifying track meet. Every inch of success has given me another taste, every failure has only increased the burning for the ultimate thing: the marathon!

I remember just a month or so ago, the first time I ran fifteen miles and felt, for the first time, a true sense of despair about it, like it was something that I maybe just couldn't do. I have an insatiable optimism when not in the precise moment of trial. And though I have a great capacity for fear and panic in the moment, beyond it I am determined and sure. So it shook me that day when I came home and said to my mom, "You know, I just don't know..." But the following long run was longer, and I felt fantastic at the end of it. 18 was thrilling because I'd never been there before and I felt that the marathon was truly finally within my grasp, that the massive number 26 was something I could and would do.

But yesterday, in the hot sun, on the hill, 18 was not thrilling, it was miserable. For that matter, 8 was miserable if only just because I knew there was still so much to go. My mind was just ...off... from the beginning. I was so full of fear you could have wrung it out of me. Even my running partner kept looking at me in disbelief. "Kristin, this isn't like you..." At the time, I didn't feel too bad about it, because I felt that the pessimism would be outweighed by the result, that when I finished the pessimism would seem justified. After all, no one says a marathon is easy. The better you are, the more you want to try, I imagine.

But by mile 13, C. was slipping away. She had been pushing past me since the first mile, though I'd brushed it off as race-day enthusiasm, something we'd traded between us on these longer runs. As we rounded the 14th, however, I came to know that she just had more in her than I did. More: skill, training, mental capacity? I don't know; just more. By 19, I couldn't see her anymore, and when we passed each other on a turn around, we cheered, and I noticed she still looked fantastic. Where was my confidence? Where was the hard work I'd put in? Earlier that day I'd talked to another runner before the race and we'd agreed how scary it feels to taper your mileage right when you feel that you need it the most. "You'll be surprised how much your body remembers, though," she promised me. But whether or not my body remembered, I have no idea. My head completely forgot. I, at no time during the race yesterday, had the notion that I could really accomplish it, and purely because of that, I feel today that I did not.

Right before mile 19, something strange happened that's never happened before, and my throat closed, like I was breathing through a straw. The more afraid I felt, the tighter it closed, and I knew something was wrong. Finally, a man in front of me turned and told me to stop because he was worried about my breathing. And that's when I started to cry. Which, of course, only made my breathing more laborious. A few seconds later, it went away as quickly and strangely as it came and I didn't think a lot of it, but looking back at it, its obvious that I was absolutely seized with fear. My throat closed again a mile later, but I closed my eyes and concentrated on relaxing and it opened again without much trouble.

At the water station between mile 21 and 22 I sat on the median and sobbed, because I knew I just didn't have anything left. You might think to yourself that 22 is so close to 26 and that I was pathetic and that four miles is no big whoop if you've just run 22. And you'd be right about the pathetic part, but four miles IS long- its forty minutes-- actually, longer at that point, sadly, and my legs felt like they were make of machine gears and nerves.

And then out of no where, I heard someone say, "Hey, hey, you're okay, come with me. We'll walk to the end together."

When you first meet new people, you always want to present the best side of yourself. That is just the way the world works. But not in a marathon- everyone you meet is like family, like the man who made me stop when my throat closed and only went on his way again when I'd promised to take care. When I met M. on the course yesterday, I had my worst, my ugliest, weakest foot forward. And she didn't leave me till we'd crossed the finish line.

We ran every few minutes, and stopped every few minutes, too. This was her sixth marathon, but this time around she was injured, she told me, and I looked down to see a brace on her leg all the way from her knee to her ankle. We talked about running, and about goals and we met some others along the way. One man I'd passed at the beginning, pushing himself in a specially designed racing wheel chair came by and now cheered us on at the 25th mile. The course began to look different, slower, the people less consumed with the fire of what was ahead, but full of something else now I didn't recognize. My legs throbbed and shook and my stomach threatened to upset, but I knew M. and I would stop if we needed to, and we did, a lot: sometimes for me, sometimes for her, and I didn't mind.

Finally, I saw a long, steep decline, at the bottom of which was a large cardboard number 26. So we ran to the end, slowly, gaspingly and smiled into the camera that broadcast my finish to my family 2000 miles away, huddled around Shea's computer, who made bets whether or not I would throw up right then and there.

M. and I stopped to have our pictures taken together and then after exchanging names and facebook accounts, parted ways. Ten minutes later I threw up every cup of water and cytomax into a plastic-lined carboard box marked 'Recycling,' while Pat and a friend from the store turned modestly away and waited.

I don't really know why I feel so heart-broken now, but I want so badly just to go for a nice, easy six mile run by myself and think about nothing. I just want to see some beautiful scenery and be quiet for a while, but my legs are so broken and sore I can hardly sit in one position for more than ten minutes.

I know it seems selfish to cry over a marathon time, when there are so many people in the world experiencing real loss, or who wish they were healthy enough to stand or walk for long distances or even run, but its more than my disappointment over the results that aches. It is the loss of myself at the crucial moment. I should have been there, I should have scraped up some resilience from the deep of me. But I didn't. I just felt empty and panicked.

I want so much to try again and succeed, but you can't just recreate the 23rd mile of a race. The entire meaning of a the 23rd mile is the 22 that come behind it. The secret of the success of a 23rd mile just isn't that easy. It's really long, and really hard and takes a lot of faith. and 22 other miles.

So, tomorrow its back to the grocery store. 5am. But I guess that's the wonderful thing about disappointment and marathons. Life just goes on and on anyway. So in the words of my new favorite line of running gear: We all run on.

We can only hope.

Marathon

2009-06-28T12:38:00.000-07:00

So, there are the events of yesterday:

3:40am I wake up after a night of terrible attempted sleep
3:45 shower
4:00 breakfast of oatmeal and chocolate almond milk, one rice cake
4:30 we decorate our arms with permanent markers
5:00 a stop at my apartment for pictures
5:05 we anxiously load up the car and zoom downtown, to the Westin where a vehicle supposedly waits to shuttle us to Tukwila, the start line
5:20 panic- the line is six blocks long
5:25 ATM
5:30 hail a cab
5:40 arrive in Tukwila after hopping the highway railing and walking the exit around the mile long standstill of shuttles and drop-off traffic
5:50 check our gear, pee
6:10 shiver in a half hour line to pee again, eat a bagel and peanut butter sandwich
6:45 head to start line
6:55 wait in corral
7:26 cross start line, walking, screaming and waving at the camera
9:43 Half Marathon
12:31pm Finish
12:50 vomit water and cytomax into a recycling bin
12:55 pick up gear
1:20 catch city bus home

A little plug for my new friends

2009-06-26T09:40:00.000-07:00

The marathon is tomorrow. I am feeling... okay about this.

Yesterday C., my running partner, and I stopped in at the Rock 'n' Roll Expo for FOUR HOURS picking up free CLIF shot blocks and kiwi halves. I got my t-shirt, my number, chip and some unexpected purchases, one of which, I would like to share.

At running events, like marathons, multitudinous running companies (and a handful of chiropractic, naturopathic, and other various oddities) show up to peddle their wares. Typical are the shirts: "26.2 miles. Been there; Run that" and "I know I run like a girl. Now try to catch up," and while these shirts are definitely festive and playful, I discovered a new line of running apparel called Running Divas (www.runningdivas.com) with a refreshing distinction. They sell not only t-shirts but sweaters, long sleeves, undies and even thongs, all randomly (and thoughtfully) smattered with poetry written from their experiences of an active, competetive lifestyle. While you may see typical "runner's gear" and be tempted to spend, Running Divas sell products and messages that you must witness like art before you even think about your checkbook. It's beautiful, intriguing and in the end, collaborative with your own experience of the sport. There is something other runners can recognize, something we already know we're a part of.

As for the messages themselves, they're wonderfully understated, a unique move in athletic apparel. Many of the shirts simply say, "It's who we are. It's what we do." Several have the words in a long skinny vertical tower "mile after mile after mile after mile..." and on the back "I'll be miles away." It seems to capture the mundane and difficult work of a long run, while still somehow allowing space for the peace and joy that solitude and hard work bring. Some just sprout random running realities like "morning runs... alarm clocks" or "runalicious" that make us laugh or roll our eyes in recognition, even in memory of our own seasons or competitions. Other products are just plain fun, like the thongs that read "marathong" across the front, unapologetically.

Running Divas seem to remind us what we feel on our best days: that running is, while difficult, a ton of fun, and that we are more beautiful, stronger and happier people for participating. Please check them out! And good luck to everyone racing this weekend!

Oh!, and my shirt? Looks like this:

Happy

When she's running
she's flying

2009-06-15T18:16:00.001-07:00

Long Road Home

2009-06-13T16:29:00.000-07:00

I ran 19 miles yesterday, and I I just don't know if I'll ever recover. First of all, I did about four stupid things. The first stupid thing was this: I didn't bring any food with me. Two: I ran (what I thought was) ten miles out and ten miles back on flat pavement with virtually no change in scenery. Three: I mistook the distance to Christy's bookstore (my designated turn around point) as ten miles when it was actually eleven. Four: I started running too late and stranded myself in the dark on a woodsy notorious-for-shady-happenings trail three miles away from home (since I had to walk back because I miscalculated the distance).

I am dearly hoping that if I don't do these four stupid things in the marathon, the result will be so great that I can run seven additional miles. This is the plan anyway. That and TAKE THE GU. I know its creepy, but TAKE IT. Food for runners, while arguably not food, is free and mentally helpful since one knows that it should work since it has for so many others for so long. Don't know what GU is? Google the GU.

K. came over for dinner Thursday night and I was euphorically happy. I picked up my clean laundry, washed the dirty stuff and made my bed. I reshuffled my bookshelf, and lastly, I stuffed my stack 'o papers under the couch which unfortunately contains another student loan (my fingers instinctively type 'stupid' instead of 'student') bill, the THIRD which I didn't even know about until it was 90 days overdue. How did they get my address to send me the threat, since they lost it for the warning? But, shoved under my couch, it looked a lot better. Christy bought flowers for the table and the sun showed up right about 5:15 and we opened all the windows. It was a beautiful evening, though the sun has been beautiful for days now.

K. brought a fantastic dessert and Pat helped me pick out the wine and I haven't touched alcohol in about four weeks because of the marathon, so I was ecstatic to share it with her. We boiled water and sauteed squash and asparagus and threw in some vodka sauce. At 7:15 Pat came home from work and dinner was served. It was fantastic-- mostly the wine. Two glasses later, we all had a lot of opinions. And I thought a lot about the world.

There are many things broken, and I hate it. Its true that resources are misused and social structures are corrupt and rotten. But I look at myself. I care a lot about people, but I'm a jerk all the time. I am broken, I feel corrupt and rotten. This doesn't make me depressed and repentant- I'm only human, but it does make me reevaluate. I care about the environment, and I'm constantly making comments at the grocery store about how we handle our resources, and yeah, it frustrates me. But then I look at myself again: how many things have I thrown out this week that I could have recycled just because I was lazy? Have I really done the research about my own city's recycling policies? Every time I get angry about the world, I look into my trash bin.

Along the road last night I saw signs for forest restoration and I thought about eschatology, one of my least favorite subjects. But I realized that in my hope for the future of the planet is a little bit of that reconciliation-talk from college. Part of the reason I both care and want so much to act is that I believe in something.

And that was a little bit of a surprise. Me. Believe. So there you go, you lovely Mormons.

Watching A. -we learn about feeding

2009-06-08T21:44:00.000-07:00

I keep thinking about Anne Lamott learning to feed herself as she describes it in Traveling Mercies, my favorite of all her autobiographical work, definitely worth reading. Anyway, I watched A. again a couple of weeks ago and something she did completely blew me away.

We are eating dinner, something she seems to never enjoy and I immediately begin the dinner-ritual I often force on the kids I babysit which is: politeness, nice conversation, and the eating of as many vegetables as possible. Now, A.'s parents seem to be health nuts of the best variety and both our plates are packed with whole wheat pasta and carrot sticks (this is typical: also broccoli, yams, cucumber slices and hard boiled eggs) so I don't worry about the nutrition, but I do worry about her eating habits. She rocks back and forth in her chair and is unresponsive to my conversation-making (usually successful among the 7-and-under female variety), she tells me she hates the food I've made even though I make her thank me for making it and even though I'm almost certain its what she eats every night. This is a mystery to me; she just won't eat with me, and she flat out won't enjoy it.

Then, out of no where, something clicks in her mind and she grabs a wooden block that is in front of her on the table. There is a large letter 'A' on one side of the block, a 'B' directly opposite and four pictures of Santa on the remaining faces. It seems to be the sort of decorative block used to spell sweet, festive words like, "peace", "hope", or "joy" during the holidays.

"Okay, here's a game," she tells me. I'm just slightly intrigued. I was about to chuck my hopes of Dinner Time out the window. "Okay..." I hesitantly agree to hear her out. "I'll roll this, and whenever I get the 'A' I take a bit of pasta. A 'B' means two bites of carrot and a Santa means I lose my turn." She says this all with the confidence and logic of a school-teacher explaining an extremely simple game to a five-year-old, though she is, in fact, five herself. "Sure," I say, unsure of how this would turn out. She rolls the block. It's an 'A.' She grimaces, but dutifully eats a bite of the 'disgusting' pasta. Then she rolls a picture of Santa (was it on purpose?) and hands the block to me. Slightly amused that I am also a part of the game, I roll the block and a 'B' comes up. I've been eating already and my carrot is already halfway gone, but okay, for the sake of the game, I crunch two bites. She seems satisfied at my assent. Then I roll another 'B', and we laugh, but I do my business. Then an 'A', then another 'B'. Okay, I think to myself, this is not the point of the game. So I roll again, but carefully this time. Santa. I pass the block. She is catching my drift; she rolls a Santa also, but I am sure that it was on purpose.

I figure all pretenses are gone. I don't bother attempting to appear as if I am fairly rolling the block like a dice. I simply turn it over so that the jolly St. Nick smiles up at us, but she doesn't challenge me. She picks up the block. It is her turn. She turns- without pretending to roll- the block to the toothy saint. I take it back and do the same.

At this point I assume the game is over. Just as I am about to change the subject and request that we eat normally, something very interesting occurs. It is her turn, but instead of turning the block to Santa, she turns it to an 'A.' I look up at her and furrow my brow, skeptically. She shrugs and takes a bite. It is still her turn, so she takes the block in her hands again and turns it 360 degrees. 'A'. She chews and I grin at her. Do you want to eat? And she must, because before her turn is over she's eating six bites of carrots and four pieces of pasta. I take it back and 'roll' a 'B' because I want another bite of carrot. She rolls another four letters before passing the block back to me, and together we learn to feed ourselves.

I thought about this tonight when I was running. Sometimes the main reason I like being alone is because I'm so affected by the people around me that I actually think there might be something wrong with me. But, in turn, I'm almost always depressed when I'm alone simply because there is nothing outside my own crazy mind to affect me. Why can't I learn to fill my time contentedly without achieving the affirmation of the community surrounding me? It is obvious to me now why I choosing and keeping my friends is such a sensitive task. They are the ones who make meaning from the empty mental drawers of 'good', 'bad', 'useless' and 'holy'. Watching A. the other night I realized why things like running, liturgy, lists and schedules are so important to me. They are simply frameworks: thinks that help me construct meaning out of my own mental chaos. They are mood stabilizers; they are like A.'s little wooden block. They tell me how to feed myself; or rather, they help me to choose the things I know I need to feed myself.

Feelings like the one I have tonight help me to understand the pull of a monastic community, or the secret desperation one has for The Other, even the small community of marriage and/or a roommate, be it lover or friend. But for now, it is late and the most important thing is that I finish the dishes before Christy comes home. Tomorrow I'll wake up early to run and head to the Food Bank and hopefully these Good Things will carry me one more day.

The F-word

2009-06-01T21:16:00.001-07:00

During my workout that Saturday Patrick and I talked about Our Future.

We've tried to have this talk before; sometimes its gone pretty well, other times badly, most of the time we just get too overwhelmed: If in one year we do A, then that next year we'll do whatever jobs/schools B1 and B2 and then in a couple years C! The fact of the matter is, all we have are variables. We'll work here for a year, maybe stay at the grocery store, maybe not. We'll move to the Midwest next summer or fall and get married, maybe work at another grocery store, maybe not. Maybe he'll go to school; maybe I will. Maybe Americorps? Maybe overseas, maybe.

So 'overwhelmed' is about all we have. The only thing we managed to agree on is the Midwest, where my family is. The grad school he had been looking at that looks the most promising for an MDiv is in California. Perfect. A couple years in the Midwest, a couple years in California. Maybe by then we'll have other prospects. Maybe we'll miss Seattle, maybe my sister'll be having kids and I'll desperately need to move to Virginia. Maybe the economy will be completely belly up and we'll move to New Zealand (this is still totally possible).

So when Pat started dreaming about the University here, the Free-Methodist Christian school, I was somewhat derailed. His California school is Episcopalian, so much more in sync with our beliefs, sympathies and societal concerns. But a professor there wrote him back, "you're just in time; we just extended our deadline for the fall..." and Patrick said he felt his heart leap. His heart, you know? What was I supposed to do? I told him to look into it.

I had a small panic attack about it today at work. I've had one before while working and left mid-shift, but got reprimanded for it later, which really doesn't bother me, but it bothers Pat a lot, and so I stayed and it was good to know that for the record, it was horrible. I had to go outside and drink a bottle of juice that cost four bucks and tasted like cucumbers. Luckily, its P-day and the Mormons stopped it to stock up on-- one can only assume-- chocolate covered peanut butter filled pretzels and dried mango slices, so I talked to them a while and felt tremendously better.

It's just that I never thought I'd actually totally move out of the house. Our house, the Tuttle house. My favorite, most comfortable, most known place. In this big city on this big island of the big, big world I feel very lonely most of the time. Especially at the store.

So on Saturday I had mile repeats and then two 800s at the end. After each one, I jogged under the shade of the Rec. Center and reported my times to Pat, so he could record them in my book. Each time I'd say something like, "8:17, But do you really think we can afford it?" And he'd look up and sigh, writing with one hand and holding the place in his book with the other, "Well my mom and dad always tell me that..." And eventually he'd cut himself off and whack my shin with his book-hand, "Go run!" Then, I'd jog back to the track.

It really was one of our most successful conversations.

Tonight I ran to Fremont, the closest neighborhood to the University campus, I think, and the one I'll live near if Pat and I get married next summer and live there together. And it was b-eautiful. It may have been Coldplay blaring through Christy's iPod, but I truly felt a rightness about it, and a real love for the city, which I feel on most days. I don't really want to leave Seattle, I just absolutely don't want to leave home and its so hard to understand how to do this.

Well, Runners: until the race is done.

At tea with the Mormans

2009-05-30T16:27:00.000-07:00

Even though it probably hasn't yet hit 80 degrees out there, I'm boiling hot after coming home from my second successful track workout in preparation for a marathon that is four weeks from today. Thoughts of recent occurrences helped the laps slide by easier:

Last night I met with the Mormons for the second time. They keep assigning me reading: 2 Nephi 11, Alma 32, etc... and I gobble it up, an ex-aspiring-Bible scholar hungry for a new task. But, four years of training has taught me to read around the words. I want context; I know more than to let the source-less passages plow into my heart without the responsible categorization of the When, the Where, (and possibly from these) the Why. I don't deal with questions like: "What does this mean to me?" That's the last thing; that's where I've spent way too much time before. So, last night I asked them if there is any textual criticism I could get my hands on. "No," they said, not offended, but still stern, "there is no disagreement regarding direct revelation from God." None? I know better- 'no disagreement' just means that someone doesn't have a voice.

In the end, I still had to have more, so I picked up the gargantuan volume by Richard Lyman Bushman, a believers account of the life and times of Joseph Smith. And I am just eating it up.

Did you know that little Joe had his first vision at the blooming age of 14? His family was poor, everyone worked to finance the farm, his mother was in and out of spiritual and physical illness with the wild voices of the Great Awakening all around them. His father occilated between alcoholism and born-again methodism (at which time his father, Asael Smith would appear to lob a coppy of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason at their door). The kids, Joseph's 7 or 8 brothers and sisters, were divided as to where they might attend church, though Joseph himself stayed home. The townspeople, Bushman reports, knew him as quiet, maybe a little slow-witted, certainly not prone to religious thought or visions. And then one Sunday morning the moody teenager yelled at his mother, "Oh yeah, well your Religion is wrong!" (She was presbyterian.) When she asked why, Joseph replied, "I can't even tell you!" (A paraphrase.) Joseph has had his conversion; his vision (that would alter slightly with each publication). But even then he knew in his heart that there was something entirely new just ahead. And that's it. That's the beginning.

This is not to say that Mormanism is defunct for me or should be for you. Just that I absolutely did not know it was like that. You always think of Joseph Smith as some great patriarch, perhaps with a long white, beard, in manner of Moses. But he was 14. I love my Mormon friends, and I don't begrudge them their craziness. I- on most days- identify with some kind of Christian, and they have done much, much, much stranger things.

Anyway, its already been a 32 mile week. Six today, none yesterday (yikes!), three the day before, but that was recovering from 18 the day before that! and Tuesday off, Monday 5.

And I apologize for any of the errors in this information, too...