Flashpost

Well, I'm sitting around trying not to go back into the kitchen for more Cinnamon Toast Crunch (that stuff is demonic), and I remembered that I had a blog. It's hard for me to remember much of anything lately, because I'm in about six different places. I mean, literally, six places.

For instance, today:

1. My House, Where All My Stuff Is.

2. Hockey Mom's House, Where There Are Four Dogs Who Need Me.

3. The Librarian's House, Where There Are Four Cats Who Need Me.

4. The Cycling Dad's House, Where My Bike Got Adjusted.

5. The Road, Where I Was Biking.

6. The Thai Restaurant, Where My Family Was Eating.

And those are just the places where I spent more than 10 minutes.

I don't feel very summer vacationy.

If Harry Potter was this movie, it would probably be my favorite movie:

Interesting Fact About Me

I keep a list of restaurants around the country that I want to visit. There are a lot of places in New York City, which means I'm just waiting for a reason to go there so I can eat, but some of them are really far out there, and if I'm ever in the area, it'll be specifically because I came to eat at that restaurant.

And I have no problem doing that.

Currently, though, I'm thinking about Peanut Butter & Co, in NYC. Which is a whole restaurant devoted to peanut butter sandwiches.

I am fanatical about PB&J and Fluffernutter. I could eat them 3 meals a day, everyday, except there's other delicious things that get in the way of that scheme, like Broccoli with Garlic Sauce and Mellow Mushroom's Tempeh.

I can cook pretty much anything I could possibly want to eat. I can saute, bake, poach, whatever. I love doing all those things, and I have no objection and actually enjoy the time involved. I just really love peanut butter sandwiches, so I tend to eat like a bachelor who may or may not know how to do his own laundry.

I hate jelly, though - for me the 'J' in PB&J is 'Jam.' For me, if it's clear and void of fruit, I don't want it. I think preserves and whole fruit jams work better with the peanut butter and stick to the bread more pleasingly. Also, I prefer to make my sandwiches at least 20 minutes in advance and let them sit, J side down.

And sometimes I cut them into little triangles like my mom used to for my school lunches, before I read Harriet the Spy and decided that I wouldn't eat anything except tomato sandwiches at school.

Shut up and drive.

At about 6:45 this morning, I didn't think it was going to be a good day.

A combination of no coffee, 6:45 in the morning, and a complete lack of understanding of the words 'north' and 'south' meant that I was pretty sure my running group was going to leave without me.

This is not an admission of any kind of criminal misdeed, but I got from Oak Ridge, NC to Randleman, NC in 15 minutes. Google says it takes 45 minutes to do that. I don't know how I made it - I'm fairly certain I somehow acquired the power of teleportation. It was probably the Sun Maid tart cherries I decided to gnarf when I was leaving the house. My internet research indicates that they have magical properties. (I just know they're freaking delicious and I didn't think I could make it until after the run since I had to be awake for so long. Empty-stomach-running really only works for me if it's a roll-out-of-bed-and-run type of thing.)

So I arrived in the parking lot of the ABC store of Randleman, NC in a tiny bit of a post-teleportation tizzy, and although I put on a cheerful face because the guys had clearly decided to wait for me, I was pretty sure that the run was gonna suck.

If you're not in North Carolina, or you haven't been paying attention, it's really, really hot out there. NOAA has a big red banner above the forecast that describes it as "excessive and dangerous heat and humidity." So the obvious thing to do is go for a run.

On the Thursday run, I died. Died hard. I walked back to the store. I never walk back to the store. It's my rule of Thursday night runs - or it was before I got hurt. I go as hard as possible, which means I feel like shit, which means that on any given Thursday, I'd love to quit. I had to make the rule of No We Want Some Mo', We Want Some Mo' (Remember The Titans FTW) or else I would never make it back. But on Thursday I was so hot I really, genuinely thought I was going to pass out, or vomit. It wasn't just me because The One With Manners had to stop walking three times because her vision was blacking. The only time I've ever been hotter is that time at Salem Lake last summer, when I was still learning how to run more than 3 miles, and I made it 5 miles around the loop (which is 7 miles) and was so overheated and dehydrated that I stopped sweating.

Today's forecast being all excessive and dangerous, I was pretty sure the run was going to suck. On top of that, it was my first time back running long. I hadn't run over six since the Wednesday 10-miler when I decided that something was really wrong with my ankle. The plan was 10 miles at around a 9 min/mile pace, but I didn't actually think that was going to happen.

Damn if it didn't, though. And at an 8:42 average pace.

I started to fade in the last mile, but... I don't know. I never felt really bad. I was aware it was hot, but I didn't seem to be feeling it the way the others were. I drank about two sips of Gatorade at both water stops, and shoved a chunk of ice in the back of my sports bra for the last leg, but Thursday hurt so much more. I guess my heat threshold got raised or something.

I came home, went to Target, took a nap in my papasan chair, and now I'm watching a British tv show on Hulu called How To Look Good Naked and thinking that maybe, just maybe, I can do this. Maybe I'll actually be just fine for Richmond.

I'm working on a Richmond Marathon playlist. 26 songs, one for each mile. I'm taking suggestions for it. This one is my current favorite song. Rihanna is so boss, and this video is so hot. I've had a thing for women in coveralls since Michele Lee donned a pair in The Love Bug.

You don't get to tell me what I find insanely attractive.

Like I said, the playlist will be 26 songs long (and I'm trying to figure out what qualifies as .2 of a song) but this might be the overall theme song for the thing. Today someone told me, "If you run your car hard, it breaks down. If you run your body hard, it builds up."

Ergo - Shut Up And Drive.

There's should be a word for when you're unspeakably sad, but not at all shocked.

Amy Winehouse was found dead this morning. Here's a link to a great write-up by NPR.

I know she was a big mess, but she had a great sound and I've always thought that if she could only get it together, she could have been great. She doesn't get a chance to try, now, but what she did manage to give us was awesome.

(Just for the record, she's not actually in that video, but it's the official video for the song, which is "Mark Ronson featuring Amy Winehouse." I just really love it. And the video is pretty cute.)

Just so you know...

See these? Yeah, I made them.

'Ameliorate' is one of my favorite words.

This morning I woke up at 7 when my alarm went off. The plan was, "Get up, eat breakfast, go riding, come home, eat lunch, be a productive and fully functional adult."

Except I opened my eyes and my first thought was that someone had been beating my quads with sticks. Possibly several someones, and possibly with Alloy 1090 Carbon Steel sticks, which I've recently learned is the hardest metal known to man. When you talk about things harder than Alloy 1090, you have to use words like 'diamond' and 'ruby,' neither of which make good beating sticks.

I optimistically rolled out of bed, thinking that maybe getting a little blood flow into my legs would ameliorate the problem, but as I hobbled across the basement, I squinted up the stairs and thought, "No freaking way." And if I don't feel like climbing six stairs, I really don't feel like riding 30 miles.

So I went back to sleep. I'm okay with skipping a day of riding, because I've put my legs through hell lately, swapping between two kinds of bikes which put stress in different places, doing all the aggressive hip flexor strength training the Orthodoc prescribed, and trying to ease into running without easing too far out of biking. I'm running around the track tonight, and I'm hoping having the fresh(er) legs will pay off for me.

No, I'm still not gonna push it and try to actually do a track workout, but I might aim for under a nine minute mile while jogging around. I think that's achievable. My ankle really hasn't hurt lately, except in places when I'm 99% positive it's the brace keeping it from flexing the way it wants to. I can't wait to get out of this brace.

I just considered and nixed the idea of posting pictures of the scabbing, irritated sores on my ankle because of the brace. You're welcome. Moving on.

So I slept in.

Well, I slept until 10:30, and that feels really late to me. Then in the spirit of being a lazy unemployed bum like I'm told I am, I woke up, rolled over, put my glasses on, and resumed watching the episode of Food Network Star I had paused the night before.

It felt unspeakably lazy, but I think I really needed it. When I finally got up, I did my morning calisthenics and went to make coffee. When I brought my joe back downstairs, ready to watch the latest episode of Masterchef, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

And then I stopped and looked again.

Because for the first time in about two weeks, maybe more, I liked what I saw.

My self-esteem is a strange and fickle thing. It's cripplingly low and annoyingly high, occasionally at the same time. I generally think I'm attractive in my opinion, but that other people probably don't see me the same way I see myself.

Usually the mental battle for me is to convince myself that it doesn't matter what other people see so long as I like myself. I genuinely believe that anyone can be attractive if they have confidence and believe in the themselves. Lately I haven't been able to look at myself in the mirror and see anything worth being attracted to. Is it the lack of running? The social and personal failures? I figure it's the same reason I want to go on a solo road trip so badly I could cry. There's something ungrounded bouncing around inside of me and I don't like it. I don't feel like people should want to be around me right now. I'm a shell person - something hard and superficial, hiding something secret, soft, and waiting to be subjected to heat and seasoning.

But this morning, I liked myself in the mirror again. And that's a step in the right direction. You have to learn to scramble before you can poach, right?

I'm going to break the 4th wall of the egg metaphor to mention that I don't really know how to poach an egg. I know the basic technique but I've never liked soft yolks so I never bothered to try it out. I've poached pears but that's really not the same thing. I like pears, but they're only good for about five minutes of their life span - all the rest of the time they're either too hard (which is when I usually eat them) or rotten.

That right there is as close to a discussion of recent events and my feelings as you'll ever get out of me. I'm really looking forward to track tonight.

Today's post brought to you by Fanta Orange Zero, because you know you wanna wanna Fanta.

Today I learned my first lesson in road biking:

When you feel like there's something wrong with your tire, it's probably not your imagination and it's probably not going to get better.

I also learned my second lesson:

When your tire blows up while you're going down a hill, it's scary as fuck.

But everything was OK, because I was really close to the part of my ride where I meet up with My Fake Boyfriend at the tennis courts, so I pulled my phone out of the back pocket of my hideous-but-blessedly-breathable bike shirt and called him. He always brings his truck, since his bike goes in it, so we threw my bike in the back, drove to my house, swapped it out for the old bike, and went back to finish the ride.

It wasn't OK at the time because I hadn't had any coffee, but now I see that no English Majors were harmed in the making of this production. My new tires come in on Thursday, and there's certainly no harm in continuing to use the other bike till then.

Still trying to decide on a name. I'm flirting with the name 'Kikuno,' off the fact that she's Japanese. Kikuno was my favorite character in the Kei Kumai film The Sea Is Watching. She was played by the effortless Misa Shimizu. I may have fallen a little bit in love with her by the end of the movie. And this may be way too much thought into the name of a bike. I can't tell. I may put way too much thought into my life.

Possibly.

The song of the day is Shut Up And Kiss Me by Orianthi. I find her addicting, sweet, poppy, and just a little bit hard to break into, like rock candy.