Marathon Recap: Spectator Edition

Congratulations to everybody who ran the Chicago Marathon today! Y’all are awesome.

Since I swore after last year’s royal fuck-up that I’d never do Chicago again, I decided I should at least cheer the runners on. So I made a sign last night that said YES YOU CAN in huge blue letters, and I headed down on my bike to North and Wells. It’s a great location because you can easily walk between mile 4 and mile 11—they’re not even half a block apart. I finally got to see the elite runners live, something I’ve never been able to do since I’m a middle-of-the-packer. And… wow. I couldn’t run that fast for quarter of a mile. The women’s Olympic Gold Medalist, Constantina Tomescu-Dita, was there, though the pack went by so quickly I couldn’t pick her out (she came in fourth today). I hung around at mile 11 for awhile and saw two of the five people I was tracking.

I’d planned on leaving after that, but I really wanted to see my friends finish the race. So I hopped back on my bike, got on the lakepath, and headed downtown. I got a great cheering spot on the inside corner at Michigan and Roosevelt, where the runners turn onto Roosevelt, make a final left turn, and cross the finish line. That last stretch up Roosevelt is probably the biggest hill on the entire course. I once tried to run it for a hill workout, and it turns out that the incline isn’t really all that steep. But after 25.9 miles, it’s a freakin’ mountain. I screamed myself hoarse cheering people on, and saw two more of the people I was tracking, plus at least half a dozen other runners I knew. I headed to the CES tent afterwards, and then it was back home. (Where… I discovered that I have a moderately bad sunburn. The worst I’ve gotten all summer, actually.)

I was really impressed with the runners I saw—the weather, while a good twenty degrees cooler than last year, was still anything but ideal. It was nice this morning, but by 10:30 or so, it had really heated up, and I know most of my friends didn’t have quite the race they had planned on, which I know is really frustrating, especially when it’s been cool all summer. WHEN will they learn to start this race at 7am, honestly?

My next marathon plans are still tentative, but I’m hoping to do the D.C. Marine Corps Marathon next October. Heads up to my  D.C. friends, since you may have a house guest with an insatiable need for ice (ahemryanlisajenbarb). I’ve got at least three more half marathons to keep me busy until then, and hopefully I can get my time down and get back into shape before marathon training starts next May.

More marathon pictures here. I unfortunately took most of them at mile 11—I wish I’d taken more near the finish line. And I wish I could have gotten a picture of the best t-shirt I saw on a runner: BRING IT KENYA.

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current book: It sounds like my next one will be Gilead, followed by The Poisonwood Bible. Weigh in below and help me figure out how to get through this mountain of reading!

current music: I really need to buy my tickets for the Calexico show in November. I just haven’t been by the Metro lately. Will do it this week, for sure. Who’s coming with me? It’s gonna be an awesome show.

current socks: I wore running socks today. Other than being very comfortable and having small purple stripes on the back, they’re not all that novel.

What Next?

I have a book-buying problem. It might actually be worse now than when I worked at McBookstore, because then at least I had the option of borrowing books from the store instead of buying them (this was easily the best perk of working at a bookstore—better than the discount, even). I have tried to become a library user, but I really just love owning books. Also, I have yet to return a book on time, have racked up hundreds of dollars of fines over the years, and am blacklisted in at least four different library systems in Indiana. Oops?

I realized recently that I now own a lot of books that I’ve never read. So I’m making a decision: read at least half of those books before I buy any more. I made a list of books on LibraryThing that I own but have not read. And now I need your help: where do I start? What do I read first, and why? I’m listing them below, or you can check them out here, where you can also find descriptions of the books and other information. (If you’re really interested, I also keep a list of books I want to read but don’t own).

Assume that I want to read all of these books equally, and in cases of particularly “difficult” authors—like Cormac McCarthy and Salman Rushdie—assume I’ve read other books by them and know what I’m getting into.

• The Toughest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie
• Numbers in the Dark and other stories by Italo Calvino
• Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
• The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
• Slammerkin by Emma Donaghue (thanks, Ryan & Lisa!)
• The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• The Magus by John Fowles (which I technically don’t own, but have on loan from Ryan)
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
• The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (thanks, Tim!)
• Islands and other essays by Jean Grenier (I have already read the lovely essay “Mouloud the Cat”)
• Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts by Clive James
• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
• The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosas
• All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
• The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
• The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie
• The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
• The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith
• Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel
• Omeros by Derek Walcott
• Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology by Lawrence Weschler
• Practicing Mortality: Art, Philosophy, and Contemplative Seeing by Joanna E. Ziegler and Christopher A. Dustin (my two favorite college professors)

So. What next? And why?

A Few Housekeeping Notes

I thought I’d (re)start my blog with a list of things I’ve done since I last posted, but honestly, it’s not all that interesting. My life is generally busy but not terribly exciting: I still run a lot, I did a major bike event earlier in the summer, I traveled for work to places like Lansing, Michigan, and Peoria, Illinois, I drank cheap beer. See what I mean? You didn’t miss much.

I’m going to try to update some of the links on my blog; I just added a sidebar of all of the reviews I’ve written for Contrary Magazine, which you should immediately go and read. The magazine has some fantastic pieces. I think you’d love it.

For those of you who spend your days staring at a computer screen and need more distractions, you can also follow me on Twitter, a kind of hybrid of instant messaging and micro-blogging. Fair warning, though: I spend a lot of time complaining about the CTA and the people who ride it.

There is also a sidebar for a social bookmarking site called Delicious, which I use relentlessly. The sidebar will show my three most recent bookmarks. There’s a lot of environmental/conservation stuff that I bookmark for work, a lot of political commentary (I’m obsessed with reading about the presidential campaigns), and a lot of shopping sites. What can I say? There’s a lot of cute stuff out there. And if I can’t buy it, I can at least bookmark it and share it with you.

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current book: I need to find something to review for the next issue of Contrary. Hmmm.

current music: Calexico’s Carried to Dust.

current socks: A pair of brown socks covered with silver and purple stars. My friend Megan sent these to me from Ireland a few Christmases ago. They used to be chocolate-scented, but sadly—very, very sadly—the scent has washed out. Boo.

Wait, what? I have a blog?

Yeah, so, it’s been awhile. What if I commit to blogging one day a week? Will you come back to visit?

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current book: The Great Lakes Water Wars by Peter Annin, though it’s pretty slow going. It’s a somewhat dense book in terms of facts, and somewhat thin in terms of narrative.

current music: Heard Joy Division in the Kopi Cafe in Champaign-Urbana this morning (apparently no relation to the Kopi Cafe in Chicago). Been stuck in my head ever since.

current socks: Stripey SmartWools. I believe the design is called “margarita.” Natch.

Birthday Portrait

What Paradise Looks Like

Photo taken by jaq when she was in Phoenix this March, and slightly doctored by me. (This post is tagged “Texas”  because Bluebell is a Texas thang.)

Health care at its finest

For months, my primary care physician has been nagging me to get an appointment with a urologist. I’ve had three kidney stones, and even though I haven’t had one in four years—four years!—she tells me I have to have a urologist in Chicago. They’re hard to get into, she says. You have to have one in case you have another kidney stone. Blah blah.

So the morning of my last doctor’s appointment, I made the appointment with the urologist so that she would stop nagging me (she called it persistence). And that appointment was today at 3pm.

I always hated going to my old urologist in Indy. I was the youngest person in the waiting room by 50 years, and the only woman. All the old men put their golf magazines down when I walked in. And really, I’m so glad I could give them that breath of fresh air, but I’d rather be in just about any other doctor’s waiting room.

There was a little more diversity in this waiting room (though I was still the youngest by a few decades), but it had a few strikes against it before I even saw the doctor: it shared a waiting area with the Alzheimer’s Disease Center, so I picked a chair facing the other direction because I really can’t deal with sad. The lights kept flickering, and I kept imagining that some poor Alzheimer’s sufferer was confusedly flipping switches somewhere (your mind goes to funny places when you have nothing to read but Money or Golf magazines). The receptionist had given me a pager—the large blinking kind you get at some restaurants—and mine finally went off 20 minutes after my scheduled appointment time, just as my brain was turning numb from reading about investment strategies.

I met a nurse in the hallway who introduced herself by way of giving me a cup to pee in. She showed me to an exam room, where a toilet was sticking out from a cabinet beneath a sink. Like this:

After another 25 minutes—this time I read an Esquire article about experimenting with steroids, which at least was interesting—a woman came in and introduced herself as a physician’s assistant. My doctor had gone home sick (which I hope explains the 45 minute wait—that had better not be the norm around there). She looked through my files and gave me some photocopies about low oxalate foods, which list pages of nutritious and delicious foods to avoid, including sweet potatoes, squash, and spinach. Clearly they are smoking crack if they think I am giving up sweet potatoes. (On the plus side, most berries appear on the list of bad foods, which means I can now tell people that I can’t eat them for fear of kidney stones, not because I think they taste disgusting. Yes, all berries. Yes, I know they’re different.)

So finally a doctor came in and explained that he wanted to determine my risk level for kidney stones. They’d do a CAT scan and then my favorite, the 48-hour pee test, in which you save all your urine in bright orange jug—in the refrigerator, mind you—for two 24-hour periods. The physician’s assistant emphasized that they’d like me to do this during the course of a normal day, when I’m working or at home. Yeah, no way in hell am I putting my pee in a biohazard jug in the work fridge. Are people who work in urologists’ offices really that far removed from reality?

The doctor, a young smarmy guy, told me that they’d have to do a pregnancy test before the CAT scan. Me: I’m not pregnant. Him, smarmily and patronizingly: Oh, I know you’re not pregnant. I just have to do the pregnancy test.

So a nurse comes in to take my blood (I can’t just pee on a cost-efficient stick?), and I assume that I’ll get sent over to the CAT scan lab afterwards to wait in a long line with other grumpy people who need to have pictures taken of their insides. Except… I have to wait a week to call just to schedule the scan. And… why the fuck are they taking my blood one to two weeks before the scan? That is plenty of time for me to go and get knocked up, and for them to harm my unborn child.

All that, and they didn’t even have fun band-aids.

2:42

I am lazy, exhausted, and freaking out about a presentation I have to give next week AND the half-marathon that will be fueled entirely by adrenaline. So to procrastinate/take my mind off things, I’ve been scanning iTunes for music I’ve forgotten about or just haven’t listened to in a while.

Not too long ago, I read Joshua Allen’s determination that 2:42 is the perfect song length. Not a bad argument: he points out that the Mamas and Papas’ “California Dreamin’” and The Smiths’ “This Charming Man” both clock in at 2:42 (although in my iTunes, “This Charming Man” is 2:46. But he makes his point.).

So instead of a blog post, I give you a list of my music that is precisely 2:42. I don’t have all my CDs loaded into iTunes, but here’s what I’ve got, even the embarrassing stuff:

• “Will Tomorrow Ever Come,” Dance Hall Crashers
• “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’ Anymore,” Travis Tritt
• “American Made,” Oak Ridge Boys
• “Felicia,” Quartet San Francisco
• “Emily Kane,” Art Brut
• “The Nights Are Made for Us,” Richard Hawley
• “The Real You,” Dance Hall Crashers
• “A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off,” The Magnetic Fields
• “Like a Rose,” Lucinda Williams
• “The Tigers Have Spoken,” Neko Case
• “You’re No Rock n’ Roll Fun,” Sleater-Kinney
• “Dreary, Dreary,” The Gothic Archies
• “Ojitos Traidores,” Los Super Seven
• “Tonight We’re Gonna Tear Down the Walls,” Randy Travis
• “Crows,” The Gothic Archies
• “Better Class of Losers,” Randy Travis
• “Leave the Biker,” Fountains of Wayne
• “Juanita,” Sheryl Crow and Emmylou Harris
• “Legal Man,” Belle & Sebastian
• “Lovely Rita,” The Beatles
• “How Blue,” Reba McEntire
• “Center of Gravity,” Yo La Tengo
• “Child of the Fifties,” Statler Brothers
• “Anymore,” that dog.
• “Pink Padded Slippers,” Blitzen Trapper
• “Counteraction,” Cornershop
• “Michelle,” The Beatles
• “Always Will,” Nanci Griffith
• “The Book of Love,” The Magnetic Fields
• “Murder Ballad,” Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci
• “Sol y Sombra,” Fugu
• “Sister in Love,” Envelopes

What do you have that’s 2:42?

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current book: Oh God. I’m pages away from finishing Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and Kavalier & Clay, which I really really really will read.

current music: The spectacular Jasper Rose Silbert Mix. Oh. I should maybe write something about that… stay tuned… I’m so tired right now it’s hard to type, but maybe tomorrow.

current socks: Today’s are white with red toes, heels, and polka dots, but yesterday’s are worth mentioning. They are my absolute favorites from The Sock Shop in London: stormy clouds, weather pattern arrows, and the words “wet & windy.” It was in fact quite wet and windy yesterday.

Retro: Bershon

I still don’t understand the etymology of bershon (anybody?), but I shore do understand the attitude. [Definitions/illustrations: Dooce, Que Sera Sera] My dad recently put a folder on my hard drive called “Personal Photo Collection,” which basically includes every photo my dad ever took ever, including several rolls of Christmas trees (all on slide film). It is also a goldmine of bershon.

Because it’s not quite Friday yet and because you might need a laugh, I give you… the eighth grade.

Seagull in Flight

Took this during a break from my bike ride along the lakefront this afternoon. I love that you can see how his feet are tucked up beneath him.