Run for it

Image found here.

Yesterday I bought a pair of running shoes. Like, real running shoes. They cost one hundred dollars.

Only, I'm not a runner. In fact throughout my life as an athlete I can think of few things that made me more miserable. Few things that made me feel so weak and incapable. I swam competitively from age 7 to 17, with a couple years of water polo thrown in, and rowed crew for 3 years in college. This meant getting up at 5am every day (6am on Saturdays) and getting my ass kicked for 2 or 3 hours. I have been an athlete. I can do things that are hard. I can thrive on the pain and push through my physical limits.

But running is something I've never been good at, something I've always written off as not for me. I've resolved, however, to change that. The thing is that I live right next to the Panhandle and Golden Gate Park, a beautiful green wonderland laced with winding paths, teeming with lean, healthy bodies. I considered a gym membership, but the thought of spending $60/month when I could get in equally good shape using just my body and the park, well, the miser in me just couldn't justify that.

I've already given this one try and ended up hurting my knees to the point that it took 3 weeks before I could walk down the stairs without cringing on every step, stiff like a robot. I was told that good shoes make a huge difference, so here goes round two. I did it right and went to a small, specialty running store just for women, tried on at least 7 pairs, and with the help of an expert, chose the one that felt right. That's the thing, isn't it? The shoes, the place, the air you breathe, your body. It all has to feel right.

Image found here.

Speaking of feeling right, let's talk about yoga. This I like. This is where I feel strong, purposeful and at peace. I have only recently managed to get my heels to the ground in down dog and it is one of my greatest triumphs. There is a lovely studio six blocks from my flat, and the 90 minute classes have my arms and legs and back twisting and folding into places that needed to be found. I hold myself up with muscles that had been missing and forgotten. I sweat. I am only my body and more than my body. I am one in a room of 40 people, melting into a steady, round OM.

There is something about that moment at the end of the class when the teacher takes all the light from the room and you lie flat on your back. It feels like that first time you spent the night away from home without your parents as a kid, when the darkness falls on you and at first you aren't sure what you're doing there, but then you are calm. You feel safe and you try to figure out what that is in the air around you, floating in the dark. It's something you don't carry with you as you move through the city. This thing in a closed room full of strangers that can only be trust.

Hear me out

Good morning daffodil in the hallway outside my bedroom door.

Hello, old friends.

It's been a while, no? If any of you are as bad at keeping in touch with people as I am, then you'll understand that the longer you go without reaching out, the harder it becomes. So here I am, four (four!) months later, crawling back to you with my tail between my legs. If I have to beg you to take me in, so help me I will do it. The surprising and wonderful thing is, however, that some of you have asked me to return to this place. To begin filling, once again, this void I've left. And that, as hard as I tried, was impossible to ignore.

I've wondered whether blogs, like dairy, have an expiration date. Do they curdle and go bad if left untouched for too long? Or is a blog more like an old piece of clothing? Something that you used to adore and wear every day, but then suddenly couldn't stand the sight of, discarding it on the floor of your closet in a sad, crumpled heap.

This has been my view of le petite blog over the last few months. A sad crumpled heap that I never wanted anyone to see again. I started shopping around to replace it, trying on generic titles and begging web designer friends for a free makeover. I hated "toes over the edge" -- so sappy, I thought. So easy to forget.

But then my sister talked me off the edge, so to speak. Own it, she said. Nurture it and be kind and it will grow into something all its own. So I've picked it up and dusted it off just in time for spring. Maybe it was hibernating for winter? Like a bear? I wonder how many metaphors I can throw at you in the form of excuses. If a blog is like a bear, a living breathing beast with a will of its own, then do I get a pass for being lazy and uninspired?

Tell me, beloved readers, that you're still there. Tell me that you'll stick with me as I figure things out and, inevitably, make changes. (Because I am nothing if not fickle.) I promise I'll be here if you will.

Welcome, 2011.

Image found here.

Happy New Year, my loves. I hope you're all safe, and though tired or hungover, I hope you're all happy. Happy and new. It's fun to see both ourselves and the new year as just that, isn't it? Brand new and clean, freshly plucked from the time continuum like a flower bud, untouched by the toils and meltdowns of 2010 and all the years that came before it. Ready to bloom and surprise us all with what color we will find.

Of course this isn't really the case. A new year on the calendar is not a blank slate and on Monday we'll all be exactly who we are, who we have been. We'll go and do exactly what we've been doing, perhaps with the errant resolution thrown in here or there. (The best I've heard so far is a total avoidance of waiting in lines at any cost, though this was his resolution for last year and it did not work. Sometimes, all you can do is wait.)

And what are we doing, anyway? Does anyone really know? Maybe this is just a question for the young and wandering like myself, but do you have to be young to wander? To wonder? Last night at a sparkly house up on a hill in Bernal Heights, I sat around a kitchen table strewn with empty champagne bottles and dwindling homemade snacks with a small group of big-hearted people, all but one of whom I had just met.

The light and life of the city below us sat patiently in the wide windows and we talked about being proud of who we are even though we don't really know what that means, being something. We agreed on the importance of progress even if we don't know where it leads. We will not be sedentary and unchanging. We will find what is new in ourselves and the world as long as we are breathing. Yes, everyone nodded gravely, yes, this is how best to live.

Just before midnight, our small band of six set off and walked 10 or so blocks to a dance party in the Mission. The crowd was swollen and giddy and agitated and we burrowed our way through to the deepest corner of the club where we danced in a pocket of air and space.

Twelve o'clock came with a shower of champagne and a screaming wish for unity and peace from the woman on the microphone, a squat lesbian with a happy raspy voice and bushy armpits. The life of the party turned out to be this lesbian's aging mother, a woman with a loose gray braid and a gold velvet turtleneck tank blanketing her sagging breasts. She looked at least 70 and she danced with more energy than any of us, her arms reaching and bending toward the low dark ceiling, her eyes smiling and alive.

None of my group really knew each other or what to make of this crowded, grungy party in the basement of a fire hazard, but we just danced and I knew it was a metaphor, moving in the dark like this. Blind, unsure of what we were doing or why, and alone but not really alone.

Renegade Craft Fair!

As you might imagine, it's been a pretty busy week trying to get settled in my new place in San Francisco and also relishing the return of my social life now that I no longer I have to go to bed at 9:30pm to be up in time for a hellish commute. No sir, I hop on the bus right outside my door on Haight for a quick zip downtown and I am THERE.

Here.

Anyway, I promise to share more about my new pad soon, but for now just know that all in all, I'm happy. And the staggering amount of art, vintage, and DIY design at my fingertips in this city is certainly on the list of things that are making me smile right now.

This weekend I'm going to the Renegade Craft Fair Holiday Sale and I am thrilled. I've been looking forward to it for months and am already prepared to WANT and, of course, to buy. Those of you in the area, I'd highly recommend checking it out. It's free to attend and will be, at the very least, fun and inspiring.

I'll be sure to showcase my finds, unless of course they're Christmas gifts in which case you'll have to wait until January. Though, let's be honest, at this rate you'd probably have to wait until January anyway.

Moving Day

This is it! Today, I move. I am unrested, unorganized, and only partially packed. I didn't get to work on it yesterday until about 5pm, but that's who I am. The bigger the move, the longer I put off the preparations.

But as unprepared as I am, I'm definitely ready.

Image found at CAPow Art & Design.

Little Miss Self-Conscious

My cubicle feels private, personal, like I'm in my own little world, protected from lurking office eyes.

This, in reality, is not at all the case. People can see me. And when they're behind me, I have no idea. They're not always there, but often a few folks will congregate several cubicle rows back behind this little Plexiglas partition. They're facing in my direction, and naturally their eyes wander. There's one tall gentleman in particular who has about 2 heads on the rest of us and an excellent giraffe's eye view of the whole office. This gentleman and anyone else who may be standing there might see me do something I do when I forget people could be looking my way.

Like just now, when I sneezed twice, then grabbed a dirty paper towel off my desk that I'd been previously using as a napkin and markedly wiped the sneeze spray off my forearm before blowing my nose.

When I turn around in sudden panic realizing my error and see people there, crap! there, I have to bank on the hope that in reality the whole world is not looking at me at all times, that they don't actually care what I do or where I sneeze. That they're probably preoccupied with sucking in their gut or taming an unruly eyebrow hair. All those things they think other people notice, when really, we've all got our own noses to blow. Our own sneeze spray where we just don't want it.

...right?

Parts of a Whole

Did you all enjoy feasting again and again on your Thanksgiving leftovers? Each day tupperwares being emptied, the options becoming fewer. At the end of the week you're eating a plate of 3 brussels sprouts, a mountain of sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce on the side. Not a meal most of us would normally prepare, but somehow because those were each part of what was once a whole, we welcome it. Next year I'd like to try something my coworker did with her friends this year: a post-Thanksgiving leftover potluck. Genius, no?

Speaking of genius, and of leftovers, I'd like to direct your attention to one of my most favorite bloggers. Krista's writing is honest and poetic and effortlessly profound. The kind of writing that makes you wish you could peer out at the world from behind her eyes, think it through her brain. Her post today is about who she used to be and who she is now, how those two people are connected, and how they're not.

"i used to be me. and now i'm me all over again. with the dirt and pebbles sifted out. i am what's left over.

the gold in the pan."

I love this metaphor, and I found it resonating with me I think because lately I have been more preoccupied than usual with the direction I'm heading in, the person I'm going to turn into. I know this is a mystery for everyone, and when you ask most people to look back on their teens and twenties they'll say they never in a million years would have guessed they'd end up where they did.

Similarly, I look ahead toward my thirties and forties, and the person I'm picturing is not me. She doesn't have my face, my hair, my body. She's imaginary. Not an older version of myself, but someone else entirely. I already know I'll turn 40 one day and be surprised that I'm actually still me.

Growing up is funny, isn't it? At all stages. My niece, Alice, has grown and changed so much since the last time I saw her in early September that I look at pictures and videos of her now and feel like I've never even met her. Like it's some other baby, some other kid, and I desperately need to make her acquaintance, meet this month's version of Alice. This bright smiling little person who moves and laughs and does things intentionally is certainly not the same tiny thing that emerged from my sister 6 months ago. That is, quite simply, impossible.

I guess what I'm saying is we never really know what time is going to do to us. It is both the most constant, predictable and unchanging truth of our existence, and our greatest mystery. But whoever we become, all those versions of ourselves that take shape over time? What we can know is that they will always remain part of a whole.