Mundane Moments

A lot has happened over the past few months. Nothing really major or life-altering, but plenty of those little mundane moments that make life worth living. I might write more about some of them later; I might not. In the meantime, though, here are a few snapshots of what's been going on in my life.

• I've read. A lot. From books that were total trash (The Friday Night Knitting Club) to books that still haunt me weeks after finishing them (We Need to Talk About Kevin). I even forked over my $10 entry to join every woman in America and read Fifty Shades of Grey. While I can see why mainstream American housewives were scandalized, the prose is on par with my 7th grade Backstreet Boy fanfic (and I mean, I do watch Gossip Girl), so I haven't felt the need to purchase the second and third installments. An interesting discussion with a 75-year old woman who declared, "the first is trash, but the story really gets going in the second one!" may have convinced me otherwise, though. (ETA: Totally bought the second one).

[Source: Google Books]

• I went on my first real vacation in years. For three glorious, deadline-free days, Andrew and I cavorted around fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, drinking beers in the streets and giving all of our money to a wizard on a slot machine in hopes of lights flashing and "Oh, Oh, it's Magic" blaring in our faces. For the record, I now totally understand why bluehairs spend so much time at the casino. I miss that damn wizard and I think about him daily.

Outside our hotel

• I got to spend some much-needed quality time with one of my besties and her husband and, with any luck, Andrew and I convinced them that New England, if not Boston itself, is the ideal destination for their next home. In approximately a month, she will be packing her car up and road trippin' to the beautiful state of VT, where she will embark on an adventure that I routinely cite as the One Thing I'd Do if I ever hit the lottery: obtain a graduate degree in English. 

Me and Cameron, the Anne to my Diana

• I'm currently 15 pounds lighter than I was on January 2nd, which was roughly the last time I cared about blogging. To some, 15 pounds in almost six months might not seem like a big deal, but for me, who has struggled with a 30-lb yo-yo for the past five years, it's a major feat. I'm having the same little struggle I always do when I'm at this weight, but it feels different this time. I usually feel like getting below this point is like prying Gollum from The Precious, but I feel as though if I could just buckle down for a week or so, I'd be well on my way to a new weight decade in no time. I have a really heavy work and social calendar the next few weeks, but in the meantime, I'm not worried about it. Which leads me to my next point, which I AM moderately concerned about...

Lighter than January, fo' sho'

• I trained for a half marathon. This weekend's Run to Remember, to be exact. I've been determined to claim my vengeance on 13.1 ever since our last bloody encounter, and training for the R2R has been everything I could have wanted it to be. I've spent the last seven months declaring my intention to smash my standing PR. Six weeks out, I had already hit 11 mile long runs. I dropped weight to get faster, cleaned up my eating, quit drinking during the week and added lower-body strength training into my routine. Everything I did was focused on slaughtering that abysmal three hours two minutes. I couldn't even get out of bed without giving it a crack. Literally. As in, "I gave myself a (probable) crack in my ankle bone"while bounding out of bed one Saturday morning for a run. Jury is still out on whether it's a stress reaction or an actual fracture, but the verdict has already been rendered: I'm not running the half this weekend.

So, that's that. Like I said, I'll probably elaborate on some of these topics (like the half and Vegas) in the next few weeks, but in the meantime, I figured I'd prove to the world that I haven't like, joined a convent or something. Just livin' the life, as they say!

Writing Waffles

Some of you know that I've been waffling over a return to blogging -- whether here or in some other, slightly more anonymous corner of the internet. 

The thing is, I never meant to stop blogging entirely. It just happened organically. People I know in the real world started to invade my cyber space (note to any fledgling writers out there trying to keep separation of blog and state: don't use your blog twitter handle for personal friendships/follows; some friend of a friend of a family member WILL INDEED find you, follow you, tweet you and...voila, you are now being followed by everyone you've ever met. And Jerry Remy). Once that happened, I knew the jig was up, and I slowly but surely started loosening up my "security parameters". I had a few run-ins with my friend, Bud Weiser, and excitedly divulged my little secret to a few close relations (Hi, Aunt! Hi, Dad!).

I don't know what I expected to come out of it. Criticism? Reprimands for revealing sacred information with the world? Maybe both. One thing I did not expect, though, was positive reinforcement in the form of interest and flattery. Here I've been spewing my most random, trivial thoughts into the world, ranging from the serious to the completely vapid and ridiculous, and suddenly I was being emailed by people I actually know with requests for more posts, or, even worse, to write about my life experiences and views on particular topics. Without even having a "major following", so to speak, I started feeling this overwhelming expectation, this pressure to produce quality content. I would go to draft a new post and, rather than ramble about whatever piqued my interest, I'd catch myself wondering what the point was, whether anything I had to say actually needed to be said.   

So I stopped writing, swiftly and certainly.

There's a bit of irony, I know, in a willingness to share intimate life details with every Tom, Dick and Harry on the internet, yet a hesitation to allow people you know, whom you have actually met and talked to and laughed and cried with, to see the inner workings of your brain.

It's like losing a trump card. A nakedness, if you will. 

I express myself far better on paper (or on screen, I suppose) than I ever could with spoken words. Those of you who know me can vouch; when I speak, all the nuance and honesty so meticulously crafted in writing is completely lost in a vortex of spastic emotion, wild gestures and a heavy dose of profanity. I can't help it; it's just who I am. A spasmodic twenty-something who swears like a sailor, swills too much wine and still can't figure out how to just let go and do what she likes to do best.

Which is write.

So, to my family, friends, "in-laws", acquaintances, random strangers, stalkers, haters and the people in eastern Europe who have been providing me with a steady line of stats these past few months, despite my lack of updates --  I'm not done.  

That was a little scary. After months of starting and stopping and staring at the screen, I've managed to write more than a paragraph and pluck up the courage to hit "publish". It's not much, but it's a start. And it wasn't as hard as I'd thought.

I mean, the way I see it, I'm wearing heels for the first time in a month.

This day can't end well anyway.