Vacation Plans and Realities

I always make grand plans for my vacations:  the novels that I am going to read, the words that I’m going to write, the miles that I am going to run, the tennis that I am going to improve, the French that I am also going to improve.  Basically, I want to perfect myself on vacation, and I always come up short in terms of my plans vs. reality. 

I am now on day 6 of my vacation;  we go back home the day after tomorrow.  The vacation is wearing down, and I realize that I only ran 5 miles twice instead of the planned 8 to 10 miles three to four times.  I also did not write as much as I’d hoped.  I thought that I’d catch up on my blog writing and would actually have some columns in reserve.  At this point, I am barely keeping pace with my workaday blogging habits.  Although I’ve downloaded some samples and read them, I have not made a dent in any novels.  In some ways, I feel like a failure.

Some other things have happened, though. I have been playing tennis almost every day, and getting praise about my progress (not sure how deserved) from much better players in my party.  I’ve been walking on the beach every morning with my husband (and sometimes kids if they want to get up), soaking up the ambience that does not exist in Dallas.  I have also gotten inspired and have done some writing (including this post) and a lot of newspaper reading, if no actual novels.  I’ve also resumed what I hope will be a lifelong photography habit. Perhaps tellingly, the pit of anxiety that has long since taken up permanent residence in the middle of my stomach is not there.

I know that I am hard on myself in just about every aspect of my life.  In addition, I am always looking for the life-changing thing to occur that will make everything so clear.  Maybe relaxation and renewal, further discovery of self, in addition to building memories and growing closer to family, is enough-the goal in itself.

Breaking Bad News to a Friend

It’s hard to break bad news, and harder still to break it to a friend.  The hardest thing is when the news is only news to her-everyone else can see the obvious.

I have a friend who is going through a hard time in the romance department.  First she happily announced on Facebook that she and her new guy “have not been dating long, but are very committed”, then posted pictures and updates recounting their various activities, such as attending a family (his) get-together.  Not long after, she very unhappily announced, also on Facebook, that he told her that he “needs his space”.  What’s more, he doesn’t want her to contact him-he will contact her “when he’s ready”.   In her mind, their situation is merely on hold, and will resume if she is patient.  Oh, dear.  

Maybe it’s so clear to me because I have been in her position more than once.  I have hoped against hope that the guy I wanted to be with wanted to be with me, and didn’t want to see that he didn’t.  Of course, I don’t know my friend’s guy, and I don’t know their specific situation.  There is, in fact, a slight chance that he might be the one in a hundred (thousand…million?) who really does temporarily just “need his space” to work a few things out, and they really might end up living happily ever after if she can just be patient.  Who am I to say with absolute certainty that that isn’t the case?   In truth, I really cannot.

Being a friend, however, I just can’t bring myself to say what many others are saying and what I know she wants to hear, that he will come around when he’s had a chance to work out whatever he needs to work out.  A few of her friends focus on how great she is, that however things turn out, she will be fine and will end up with someone who understands how amazing she really is.   That is probably the best approach.  It’s also the truth;  she is an amazing person, and deserves someone who recognizes that fact and adequately appreciates her brand of amazing-ness.

Here is what I want to say:  for whatever reason, he doesn’t want to be with you.  Probably it’s not anything you did;  whatever is going on, it almost certainly has more to do with him than you.  Maybe someone else has come into the picture and he wants to be with her.   Maybe he was using you and it’s time to move on.  Maybe he thinks that you are moving too fast and it scared him off.  Whatever.  He doesn’t want to be with you, and not boding well for his character, he doesn’t have the guts to tell you.  Maybe he isn’t closing the door entirely because he’s hedging his bets in case something (someone?) else doesn’t work out.  In any case, the worst thing that you can do is “be patient” and wait for him “to come around”. 

I don’t say it, because I know that I would not have wanted to hear it myself when I was going through the same thing.   Heartbreak is unquestionably one of the crappiest experiences in the world.  So what do I tell her?  I’ll let you know when I think of something.

Rain Running

I have to admit that it's fair to describe me as a fair weather runner, although I truly think that it's because I live in Texas.  When I say fair weather, I mean that I don't usually run if it is too cold or too rainy.  It's easy to be a fair weather runner in my part of Texas, because the weather is pretty nice year-round, and cold and/or rainy days are relatively rare.  Of course, what I've just said only applies if you like hot weather, as I do.  If I lived somewhere colder, I'd probably be much hardier in terms of running in the cold.

  It has been unseasonably rainy here for about a week now, and I can only take so much.  I finally decided that it was time to run, rain be damned.  Besides, it looked pretty good when I started my run.    

The more that I don't run, the harder it is to get out there and do it, and it had been the better part of a week.  I ended up running 8 miles.  The amazing thing was that I didn't even want to run, but I told myself I would do 7 or 8, thinking for sure that it would be 7 given my initial lack of desire.  When I reached the halfway point for 7 miles when I'd ordinarily turn back, I kept going, both surprising and delighting myself.  Then, I started down the path for my 10 mile point, and I said to myself-I'm going to do it!  Two things stopped me.  One, it had started raining.  Two, there was a couple at the start of the 10 mile turnoff who were engaging in a rather intimate kiss.  I figured that I had two signs for turning back, so I humored fate.  Soon, however, I began to wish I had turned back earlier because it started to thunder rather loudly, there was lightning, and it started raining harder.  I started to wonder what my chances were of getting struck by lightning and how long it would be before someone found me lying in the street.  I wondered if my decision to run that day would ultimately be my undoing-my swan song, as it were.  Luckily, it didn't come to that.  

Book Review-The Execution of Noa P. Singleton

Noa P. Singelton is on death row, but does she deserve to be there?  That is the mystery posed in The Execution of Noa P. Singleton, Elizabeth L. Silver's debut novel.  Noa herself provides an answer to the question during the course of the book-or does she?  

Noa is not a likable narrator, at least at the beginning of the story.  Seemingly contemptuous of most of the people with whom she comes into contact, she fancies herself a queen who is attended by her jailers.  She has been in prison for many years, having never spoken a word in her own defense during a sensational murder trial.  When we first meet Noa, she is six months away from her execution date.  Unexpectedly, she gets a visit that changes her very small death row existence.  Marlene Dixon, a high powered attorney as well as the mother of the girl whom Noa is in prison for killing, offers to petition the governor to commute Noa's sentence to life imprisonment in exchange for finding out what really happened the night her daughter died.  As it turns out, Marlene has a few secrets of her own, and a complicated relationship with Noa that predates her daughter's murder.

The book is a bit hard to get into at first due to overly florid language and a less than likable narrator, Noa herself, as well as other unsympathetic characters.  However, the novel quickly becomes a compelling read that will have the reader on the edge of his or her seat, tearing through chapter after chapter to find the next link in the story to discover the truth about what really occurred.

Yoga

I’ve been practicing yoga on and off for about six years, and currently practice Bikram Yoga.  For the uninitiated, and admittedly I am simplifying here, Bikram Yoga is “hot” yoga practiced in a room that is over 100 degrees.  The practice consists of twenty-six postures each done twice and held for up to a minute each, which is a lot longer than it sounds.   As anyone who has ever tried it will tell you, Bikram Yoga is not easy.  It does, however, help with balance and flexibility, allow for mind-clearing meditation, and work the body from the inside out to achieve the benefits.   The main reason that I practice Bikram Yoga is that I hope that it will help to keep my knees in good shape so that I can avoid running injuries.

In addition to the hoped-for knee benefits, yoga teaches me lessons about life.  For example, I was recently in a class in which the teacher was obviously new and not very confident in her delivery of dialogue and instructions (the dialogue is very important in Bikram Yoga).  As a consequence, I, and I sensed others, were frustrated because we were concerned that she was keeping us in the postures too long.  If you’ve ever done Bikram Yoga, or at least if you are me, you struggle to stay in the postures for the required time and definitely don’t want to hold them for any longer than absolutely necessary (it’s over 100 degrees in the room, after all).  At first I found myself getting upset, but then I decided just to have fun with the situation.  Usually I am rather intimidated by the rigor of the class and the teachers who call me out (Shamrockstar-straighten that leg!), but since that wasn’t happening I decided to stop worrying about how well I was doing the postures and focus on “being in the moment”.  As a consequence, I probably had almost the same experience physically as I would have had in another class, but was able to let go mentally.  As they say, I took my class to a whole new level.  Life has the same challenges.  When we are faced with a situation that is not ideal, it’s easy to get angry and give up, but the alternative is to adapt to the situation, which can render the end result even better than expected.  I think that sports in general teach this lesson very well.  A game, or a yoga class, is sort of a lifetime in miniature-there are the victories, the defeats, the frustrations, and the celebrations that happen over the course of an hour or two or three.  These physical contests, whether against another team, person, or just oneself, help us to see the bigger picture of life.  I am grateful that yoga gives me a way to understand life a bit better, and hopefully act accordingly.

Why I Love Running

I wasn’t always a runner.  I was not one of those people who ran track in high school.  I was briefly on the track team in junior high, but I was too scared to actually run a race and was cut from the team for the next year.  I made a lot of false starts with running, no pun intended.  I would determine to go to a local track after school, would get a few minutes into a run, and would run out of gas quite soon after and quit.  Basically, I was non-athletic in the extreme during my teen years and early twenties.  Finally in my mid-20s I began cycling with my then-husband.  We would ride with our young daughter in an attached carrier, where she was well protected and free to play with toys while watching the scenery go by.  I don’t know exactly why, but I always thought about running and was eventually drawn back to it.  Tentatively, I would run around a small park in town, slowing down often, but gradually working my way up to longer runs. 

For many years I ran 5 miles at least a couple of times a week, even running a marathon and some smaller races.  It has only been the last six months or so that I have really ramped up my running, having run three half-marathons in the last six months and regularly running 10 miles one day per week in addition to several shorter runs.  At this point, I can’t imagine my life without running.

So why do I love running?  I get some of my best ideas while running.  I suppose that the brain is freer to think once the body is hard at work.  I enjoy listening to music while running and getting into the groove of my favorite, usually 80s, music.  I also enjoy the nicely tired feeling I get once I’m finished.  Running does get addictive.  If I go more than a few days without running, I get irritable.  Certainly, I like the health benefits of running as well as the calorie burning properties. Sometimes the first couple of miles are tough, and I wonder how I will make it through the next three or five or eight, but by the end I feel quite euphoric.   Additionally, I love logging time on my watch and uploading my workouts, seeing what I have accomplished.  Keeping track of my runs electronically is actually something I just started doing in the last month.  I’ve had a GPS enabled watch for years, but never really used it much.  Now, I never run without it and the paired heart rate monitor.  It’s exciting to see the results of my hard work visible on a computer screen, and makes an analytical person like me very happy!

11th Anniversary-90th Birthday

Today is the eleventh anniversary of my grandmother’s death.  Of course I miss her, and she still my hero and my greatest inspiration.  Teresa Anne Clarke was born in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland on January 17, 1920.  Perhaps ironically, she shared a birthday with Benjamin Franklin, who was one of my childhood heroes along with another notable of the American Revolution, John Adams.  

When I was a kid, most of the grandmothers I knew were jolly, at least somewhat chubby old ladies who stayed home and baked cookies, and they definitely did not have Irish accents.  My grandmother was thin as a rail, worked full-time as a nurse way past retirement age, and bless her, possessed cooking skills commensurate with the stereotype of people from her native land.  She could also be tough, saying exactly what she thought to whomever she wished to say it, which sometimes caused me not a little discomfort.  However, she was mother, father, and grandma to me, raising me from the time I was a toddler.  She worked hard to instill in me a sense of faith, honesty, and integrity.  Because of her, I've never doubted that I could do anything-that the world was open to me.  I honestly don't know where I'd be if it weren't for her.  

Today also would have been my Uncle Tony’s 90^th birthday.  Yes, my grandmother died on her brother’s 79^th birthday.  My uncle was known for his intelligence and humor.  Uncle Tony was a chemical engineer, but he told my brother and me that he was a comical engineer, which made more sense to us given our age at the time, and considering his dry wit.  On a good day, I like to think that I get my sense of humor from him.  During his career he lived in The Hague, Japan, and the United States, of which he and my grandmother both became naturalized citizens.   While my grandmother lived in the U.S. for the remainder of her life after marrying my American grandfather during World War II, my uncle lived his last years in Ireland, having moved back there after retiring.

This time of year used to be reserved soley for Independence Day and its meaning to me as an American.  For the last eleven years, and certainly for the remainder of my life, it has an additional meaning.  I think of two fantastic people who, while not born in this country, loved and respected it and grew to think of it as their home.

About me

I began my career in running a bit late in life, at the relatively advanced age of 30.  Prior to that, I mostly sat on the couch each evening watching old sitcom reruns and eating Doritos and Cheez-its.  Making up for lost time, I started at the top, running a marathon although my previous longest running distance had been just 10 miles.  With the help of strong painkillers, I was able to limp through the next several weeks.  Buoyed by my initial success, I embarked on a decades-long odyssey of running, even winning some medals that were for more than just finishing.  In fact, sometimes I even placed 3^rd or 4^th in my age group in the, shall we say, smaller races.  A negative side effect that I have suffered due to my love for running is painfully severe and horrifyingly unpredictable toe cramps, which podiatrists have told me are exacerbated by my insistence upon wearing high heels.  However, it’s worth it, at least for now.  I like to listen to music while running, but am too embarrassed to tell anyone what is on my iPod.  Regarding my playlist, I will only claim that the most embarrassing artist there is Wang Chung, which sadly is not even close to being the truth.