Have another!!

this made my day!

I'm poaching this link from a Facebook friend. I never even used to watch Richard Scarry, but the song is so well synced with the animation that it's impossible not to love this.

Yes, I am going to die.

http://www.nyrr.org/races/2007/pdf/brooklyn_half_map.pdf

Because it would make far too much sense to have us start in Prospect Park, loop out of it entirely and run down Ocean Avenue to finish on the Coney Island boardwalk, these butthole sadists prefer to put the massive hill at the ten mile mark and then have us finishing the race on yet another hill on the inside loop of the park, just to, you know, make sure the entire contents of our stomachs are on the road, and there isn't some stubborn banana clinging to the intestinal lining or whatever.  

I'm luckily a little ahead of schedule with my training, so I think my plan of attack from this point forward on my sunday "long" runs is to take the train to Avenue J and run the second half of the course to the best of my ability for a few weeks until I can make that hill my bitch. 

Oh, wanna hear something else cute about the first leg of the race? While admittedly flat (the race is apparently awesome until you get to the park), everyone who's been to that boardwalk knows that walking on it is akin to reenacting a scene from Home Alone--loose boards and bolts all over the place, and I've read a few accounts now of  marathon runners wiping out on them. Not an optimal way to kick off a 13 mile run, in my humble opinion. At least it's not the sand, but maybe address such hazards, NY Road Runner officials?? Or not? Okay, i'll just shut up and barf into my Gatorade. 

Pray for Mojo, kiddies! I will need it!

Go drink a bottle of yourself.

I was able to score a beautiful Royal Blue, Calvin Klein wool (want some more ajectives?) coat on a song last December while home for Christmas, one of those purchases I didn't necessarily need but that I knew would bring me imeasurable joy. Black and Brown, while practical, don't exactly make the winter any cheerier. Now whenever I'm out shopping and they attempt to lure me to their incognito bosom, I pull out a tiny version of Jodie's mom from my pocket who shrieks "COLOR! YOU NEED MORE COLOR!" which is possibly the first thing she ever said to me upon meeting me years ago. The coat also scores points for being warm without suffocating me when the temperature creeps past fifty and being pretty roomy while somehow managing to not make it appear as if I am smuggling a sherpa across the Gowanus.

Like most wool, it can't get wet, like, AT ALL. The minute I am caught out in the rain in this coat, it is Stink City, and the smell is an acrid, unavoidable cross between a home perm kit and a wet Labradoodle. Armed with this horrible knowledge, if I plan on wearing it to work, I'll usually make the effort to check the day's forecast so I can avoid feeling like Dawn Wiener on the F train amidst a gaggle of clicky girls standing a few feet from my seat:

Hosebeast in gaggle: Uggggghhhh, what IS that? It smells like burning hair. Gross!

Cue hyper self-consciousness while I frown nervously into my paper. But what can I do? Taking it off won't help unless I crumple it in a ball and shove it in my bag or something, and not even my Big Ass Bag can contain a winter coat--I'm pretty much stuck
.

Hosebeast a stop or two later: Okay guys, it's like REALLY getting bad now--what IS IT?"

Gaggle: I know! Ewww!, etc.

Me, not exactly proud of owning up to stank, but Christ, move or shut the FUCK Up, Harpies:
It's probably me. This coat smells like wet dog when it gets wet...so yeah.

excruciating pause

Hosebeast, in her best Regina George , Christy Masters, Evian Carrie Graham: Oh I'm *sure* it's not you!

Gaggle: whisperwhisperwhisperTITTERwhisperwhisperwhisperwhisperTITTERwhisper, before the group moves en masse toward the next bank of seats.

Gaggle: GUFFAW! SNORT! BRAY! SHRIEK!

--fin--

SERIOUSLY, bitches?!? It's not like I just exclaimed, "Oh that's me--I shit myself, HA HA HA!" A little empathy, mayhaps? You couldn't save your jackal laughter until after you got off the train, since logic should tell you that moving a few feet behind me does not actually put me out of earshot? Granted, maybe on this one I should have just let the Elephant in the Room (car?) swing around and around the pole instead of piping up, but I was kind of under the impression that I left junior high in junior high and that had I been in their shoes if someone emparted the same self-deprecating confession, I would have said something like, "oh, I totally hate it when that happens," or just smiled sympathetically before ever-so-discreetly moving away if the smell was really that bothersome or whatever. Apparently I give F train passengers far too much credit.

So....the Special People's Club--any takers?

Thanks for being such a nifty crystal ball sometimes, grammar!

"Yeah, they're not real intelligent."*


*This sentence has been brought to you by Things That Make My Coin Purse Dry Up Faster Than Death Valley.

**Meghan used the term 'Coin Purse' last night and I laughed for like two minutes. 

Mea Culpa, Homeskillets.

I know I've been a big wiener lately. For that, my sheepish apologies.

It's been an eye-opener for me to learn that I apparently only have so much extra energy--that of the non 9-to-5, bill paying, cat wrangling, handling my personal shit variety--in the tank, but the past few weeks have taught me that this is indeed the case. If I want to fervently pursue something outside the norm, another "extra" is inevitably going to fall by the wayside, and the first and most obvious one to nix is my navel-gazing here...but rest assured, there's actually an entirely NEW form of navel gazing that's been going down, kemosabes! The LITERAL kind, whereby I look down at my feet as they haul my ass up a hill and I suppress the urge to dry heave! Ha! Fuck yeah!

That's right. I've been spending the past month and a half preparing for my first half-marathon, which I hope to run at the end of May if I can schedule it around a work obligation. I'm totally amped about it.

Oh, running. This commercial is a pretty spot-on depiction of our tumultuous relationship, fraught with breakups, duplicity, and denial. Before our first nearly seven year breakup during my brief foray into cross-country in high school it was already very unhealthy. Lots of "awwww, you know I want to get with you, running, but my knee is killing me, baby--I'm gonna sit this meet out; but you know I'll be thinking of you (said in Barry White's voice). The physical results were fantastic, but only insomuch as they enabled me to eat four Otis Spunkmeyer cookies (wait, was that REALLY the name of those cookies? I just had to look that up...how come at the time that never plussed me? If some dude with the last name 'Spunkmeyer' personally offered me any foodstuffs I would immediately recoil and look at his hands) for lunch every day and not feel gross about it. I certainly didn't try as hard as I could have to strengthen my endurance, cutting corners at practices and missing lots of them entirely. I only participated one season and then pretty much shelved all athletic endeavors until my gym bunny phase toward the end of college.

As I've mentioned in other posts, it really wasn't until the iPOD Nano/Nike pedometer integration that I thought, "maybe now that I've matured we can work things out, running," since music has always been my key enabler with this activity. Have you TRIED running more than a few minutes without music? Have you? It completely sucks. In fact, I'm almost positive that even back in 1996 my walkman and Jagged Little Pill tape accompanied me to most of my cross-country meets (you'll just have to take my word for it that the lyrics "Wassamatter Maryjaaaane?" take on special, cockle-warming significance when you pass a girl barfing into a storm drain). No music, no motivation.

And yet, even with the wonders of technology, laziness persists. A week off turns into three that morph into nine, weather extremes and minor injuries conveniently lengthening each hiatus--"it's freaking SNOWING, I can't run in this!" You exclaim, fully believing yourself until your friend Majo calls your bluff and says, "If I can, you can." And you can. And I did.

With a little less than a month of preparation after a four month break from running for my first official, timed 5k I woke up at 5:45 on March 1st, left my house in the dark, and sat on the A train for over an hour, steeling myself for a cold, hilly run. Particularly the latter, since this looped course had us running a couple of smaller hills before making a vengefully long incline out Ft. Tyron park. Yeah, and I wasn't kidding about the dry-heaving thing--my body's delightful reaction to a sudden surge in heart rate when tackling a big hill is to ransack the contents of my stomach, even if there are none. So when faced with the choice between puking or walking in this instance, I opted to walk for about a half minute until I cleared the hill and was able to regain my pace and clock in just under 36 minutes, an initial disappointment. "If I had just kept running up the hill it would have been under 35," I thought, my target time for a 5k.

Then I looked around. The jacked elite runners were long past the finish line by this point, obviously, but I was still swarmed by spandex clad, ear-muffed participants, the kind you see individually on the streets in winter who look maddeningly unperturbed, and you declare/think to yourself, "wow, they're nuts. That's dedication." I still don't feel like one of those people-maybe I never will--but that morning was the closest approximation to that I've experienced. And you know what I want to do with that feeling?? Wait for it....I want to CHASE IT! Don't get me started!

Ergo, running and I are officially back on and pretty hot and heavy. If a full marathon is the equivalent of shotgunning it at City Hall, then I suppose the half is akin to moving in together; not quite as scary, yet intimidating nonetheless. Will I stick to my schedule? Will some unforeseen injury thwart me? Will running remember to pick up its socks and leave the toilet seat down?

I'll keep you posted. This time I think I mean it.

Cologne

addendum, add "Cologne"somewhere in my top 5.

Meet Ugly Bat Boy (that's his real name)

Ev sent me this article a couple weeks ago, and each time I go back through my inbox I have been squinting in solidarity with this cat, unable to delete him. I feel we may have a lot in common, see. Not necessarily on the plug ugly front (hopefully), but when I look at him, I feel like he commands sort of a wise, grizzled aura. The face of one who might not be the most attractive fella on the block, but whose eyes implore you not to dismiss him, because this cat has seen shit. Those are eyes that have observed the cookie crumbling over a half-empty glass and can confirm that, yes, life IS often a bitch and then you die. If Annemarie and I end up living out the scene at the end of Death Becomes Her whereby we sit in the back of the church at our ex-husbands' funerals wearing giant floppy hats and sunglasses, laughing and chain-smoking, this is the cat I want sitting on my lap. He's sort of like a real life Azrael, which I suppose makes me the living embodiment of Gargamel, and that's pretty much who I'm channeling these days anyhow, so okay.

Hey, Happy Friday!