Wednesday, September 28, 2016

All about the green

Just stumbled upon this interview with 4 Millennial Men with 4 Very Different Salaries.

How absolutely mind boggling a time this is.

Election season - of course.

But this era too.  Wherein one millennial can be making $2,489,000 more or less than the next.

How can anyone in the various circles I run with complain?  We are all so beyond #blessed.  We joke about #basic-ness.  We are doing more than great.  We have so much to be grateful for.




Sunday, September 18, 2016

Training Runs

Three things have dramatically impacted my philosophy on life in the past ten years: proximity to untimely death, running the Boston Marathon, and jumping out of a plane.

The other night one of my girlfriends posited it's impossible to truly comprehend missing something like one's health or a loved one until you've lost it.

I think we all have our own ideas of what counts as a defining experience, our own framing constructs for how we can make sense of the parts of life that are too big and too beyond us to ever truly know inside and out.

Anyway, I'm writing... morning pages, a revision of "the book," these blog posts, emails for work, and I'm looking at the writing I'm doing as exercises.  An exercise in this or that... finding an arc, being concise, dialoguing in different voices.

It's a little bit aimless.

Less so when I sit down and type out a syllabus for myself - do this outline one week, edit that screenplay next month, write the book proposal by December, send out queries after the first of the year, and so on.

I just had this great aha moment though.  The impulse to add up the number of training runs I've done vs actual half marathon and marathon races...  The number of times I've run at least eight miles vs the number of times I've gotten medals for doing so.

10 halves, 1 Cherry Blossom 10 miler, 1 full.

12 medals, 5 times as many runs 8 miles or longer.

Gotta put the time in.

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

The Worst

I know... I've been missing my Sunday posts.

Wedding season will do that.

Speaking of wedding season (what else is there to touch upon at present?) I got this from one of my modmates earlier today:

http://the-toast.net/2013/08/01/bachelorette-party-emails/

Simply put, it's the WORST.   Mostly because it's not that funny.  I mean it's hilarious, but it's so on the nose.  It's not funny how accurate a representation of the process it is.

Surely people don't throw out unrealistic suggestions, disregard voiced opinions and concerns and, worst of all - JUST NOT RESPOND or else neglect to answer the questions an organizer has posed, right!?!

There must be an unspoken girl code in place about these things.

No!?!?

We must all have the bride's best interest at heart and one another's financial and social circumstances in mind when coming together to orchestrate shenanigans.

Mustn't we!?!?

I am eternally grateful to the point people who have organized my girlfriends' bachelorette parties of late.   They have gone above and beyond, and they have the patience of saints.

Bitches be crazy though.

Without fail.  We're all the worst in our own right.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Let's Talk About Trees For a Sec

My little cousin is visiting this week from Washington state.  We took her for lunch by the BC campus yesterday and she got such a kick out of the way people dress "on the east coast" / "in Boston" as she referred to it.  Way less hippy, way more preppy...  She's visiting her sister in DC for the weekend and going to a political event with her.  She's worried she doesn't have anything to wear, but I assured her after 5 years in our nation's capital, I'm sure her sis has prep and or conservative garb to spare.

I thought if we'd brought her to Cambridge she may see more of the aesthetic she's accustomed to, but I knew exactly the difference she meant between the way people dressed generally on one side of the country vs the other.

One of the main reasons I elected to go to BC was that on my tour there I noted there were countless kids going to class in University gear.  Hoodies, t-shirts, sweatpants...these kids wore their pride all across campus and not just when it was football season or spirit week.

One of the main reasons I told my dad I had no desire to attend UNH - despite having found its library utterly breathtaking - was that there were simply too many trees on the campus.

I've had time to ruminate on my aversion to forestry over the years, and I would like to say I've come to appreciate woodedness with age, but beyond the marveling I did at the tree tops I soared above while skydiving the other weekend, I've remained pretty impartial to everything from ferns to oaks and even apple trees.

I love them cause they give us life, but I simply don't need them near by.

I'll still take a jungle of pavement any day.