A Full Life?

My life is full right now.  Full of commitments, full of surprises, full of love.  I can't stand to add anything else to my plate, and I don't want to start anything new until I get something good and firmly accomplished.  There's a bit of a problem with that, because a lot of the things I'm working on right now don't have very near-term goals, or even clearly-defined endpoints.  They all have milestones, of course, but there's always another carrot to chase after the current one's been caught.

Take the Philadelphia Marathon, for instance.  I just started my training for it earlier this week, but it's not my first marathon, and I have no intention of making it my last.  I had a good workout today on that front, too---five and a half miles, averaging an 8:20 pace.  That's just about the best I've ever done in this kind of weather.

I ran from my office, which was something I've never tried before.  I'd originally planned to wake up early, but I was writing so much last night that I got to bed late, and there was no way I was going to turn an already-pushing-it seven hours of sleep into six if I could help it.  So I brought my running clothes into work, thinking I might run at the end of the day.  Looking at the forecast though, it seemed more and more likely that it was going to rain later in the day, so I decided to run right when I got there.  Even that early in the day there was a bit of a drizzle, but it was a good drizzle---more refreshing than soaking.  I ran from DUMBO down to Red Hook along the waterfront.  The route's an interesting mix of parks, heavy industry, and hipsterdom.  When I came back I felt accomplished and ready to start the day.  (I stayed an hour later at the end than I usually did to make up the time---I'm not trying to goof off here or anything)

As far as the writing goes, I set a goal at the beginning of July to revise 15,500 words of my novel by the end of the month (using Camp NaNoWriMo), and I hit that goal exactly at midnight last night.  Now I'm a bit more than halfway through the whole thing, although I still have plenty of work ahead of me (some of the bits that are in most dire need of revising are still to come).

On top of all that, my wife and I are currently trying to introduce a kitten to our household.  She started life as a stray, and she's still trying to adapt to life among humans, so that's one hurdle.  She also faces the prospect of making friends with our existing cat, which currently is feeling like more of a challenge from Existing Cat's side than it is from Kitten's side.  It's only been five days so far though, and we still have plenty of tricks up our sleeves.  Kitten's starting to get more and more affectionate, and she's started playing with her jingle balls all on her own (although she could have chosen a better time than the crack of dawn this morning to reveal that to us).

Work has been keeping me awfully busy as well, with a project that could have a huge benefit to my career going live in two weeks, ready or not.  Right now it's looking a bit too much like "not", for reasons that are beyond my team's control, but we're pushing as hard as we can, and we're still a long ways from giving up hope.

I've let some things slide in the midst of all this.  I've managed to keep up with my progress using Duolingo relearn all the Italian I forgot from high school, but my Japanese lessons on Rosetta Stone have slowed to more of a crawl than I'd like.  I've been neglecting the piano and guitar lately as well.  Most significantly, however, I haven't been keeping up with my share of the housecleaning---that's the one I feel worst about.  It's funny: I generally consider myself a clean, meticulous person, but when I'm focused on a project I still find it all too easy to let that kind of thing slide.  My wife's convinced that she's been a bad influence on me in that respect, but even when I was living alone I never managed to develop much of a passion for keeping everything tidy.  We've used a maid service from time to time, but there's a weird psychology around that: you can start feeling that your home is too messy to invite a stranger into it, even if that stranger's job is to clean the place.  Part of the problem is the clutter.  When there's stuff lying around that you'll lose track of if somebody else rearranges it, you want to deal with that first before getting to the more sanitation-related stuff.  When you don't get around to putting those things away though...

Still, we're making progress even on that front.  We've vowed to have the place in a state fit for company by Sunday, so with a firm goal in mind we've got a fire lit under our ass to accomplish it.  Then it's on to the fifty million other things we want to do with our lives...

My First Day on a Citi Bike

The first question anyone who knows me would ask about why I joined the Citi Bike program is, "Um, don't you already OWN a perfectly good bike?"  This is true.  I'd been using that bike to commute to work for a few months now, ever since the weather started getting nice and I put in the effort to haul the thing from my parents' house to my apartment.  It's been working pretty well, except for the fact that for the past few weeks we've been experiencing a curious phenomenon whereby the weather forecast will predict possible thunderstorms NEARLY EVERY DAMNED EVENING.  I've had the experience once of having to take my bike through the subway because of rain, and it was an awkward process of circumventing turnstiles and navigating many more stairs than I'd remembered having to climb on foot.  In addition to that, taking my bike to work involved having to bring it in around the loading docks and up the World's Slowest Freight Elevator, with it's light fixture dripping a mysterious brown fluid and its tendency to be filled with garbage carts in the evenings.  So in short, I applied for a Citi Bike membership because I'm a whiner.

Okay, maybe that's not the ONLY reason.  When I heard that New York City was getting a bike share program I felt compelled to support it, both because it encouraged healthy lifestyles and because it might get a few more people out of their cars and off of the ridiculously crowded subways and buses.  An annual membership is only $95, and on top of that I was eligible for a discount because I have a Citibank credit card that I haven't gotten around to canceling yet.  So about two weeks ago I took the plunge.  Of course it was that very evening, after there was no turning back, that I came across an article in the New York Times about the many troubles the bike program was having, with tales of broken kiosks, bikes not locking into racks, annual passes taking forever to ship, and customer service being inundated with complaints.

I experienced the truth of at least one of these statements: the pass I ordered was supposed to ship in 3-5 days, and I found myself waiting just over two weeks until I finally received it last night.  I activated it online, and I was off to the races.

...Or so I thought.  When I arrived at the kiosk this morning I realized that I hadn't paid close attention to the directions for USING the annual pass: a long rectangular fob on my keychain with a bar code on its side.  The kiosk's menu screens didn't say anything about annual passes, and the many scanners and orifices on its front didn't seem designed to accommodate the fob.  After a few minutes of fumbling around with the kiosk I finally decided to go over and take a look at the bikes themselves, and sure enough I found that next to each bike there was a slot that the fob fit into perfectly.  No screens, no fiddling with the keypad next to each bike, just jam in the fob, wait for the green light, and then out comes the bike.  Okay, fair enough.

It took a little time to adjust to the bike, but that's always the case when I ride an unfamiliar model for the first time.  It rode well enough, and the tires were probably better suited to the streets than the ones on my regular bike.  My only complaint is that the bike just has three gears, and even the highest one isn't terribly powerful.  That made for a ride that wasn't terribly fast, although I still managed to pass the occasional slowpoke as I followed the bike lanes along my route (I was still passed by a great many more bikers, but that isn't unusual---I can't bike nearly as well as I run, though part of that may be that I haven't fully readapted to the practice yet).

When I got to the bike stand outside my office, I was able to lock the bike into place after just a couple of tries, which was a relief.  Then I headed over to the clean, normal person's elevator, and headed up to start my day.

So to sum up, I still may take my normal bike in with me on days when the weather's more reliable (and if I'm going long distances---Citi Bikes start charging extra after 45 minutes of use), but Citi Bikes do come in handy for less predictable situations, which in this city are always just around the corner.

Ireland in Six Runs

Gosh, it's been a while since I've written one of these things.  So where have I been then?  Well, most recently I've been running around Ireland.  Not the whole country, mind, but enough of it to get a good feel of the place.

The occasion of the trip was a big family gathering to trace my great grandmother's roots back to a tiny little town in County Leitrim, all the way up in the northwest corner of the country.  There were ten of us, so it became a bit like herding cats at times, but we managed to get through it all with tempers relatively intact.

Our trip started out with a package tour out of Dublin, and I took the bold/foolish initiative of running around Dublin on the morning after my first night in the city when my ability to sleep failed me after ten hours.  Dublin was by far the most urban of the places we visited, so I had to keep an eye out for traffic, and I still hadn't yet gotten the hang of looking for it coming from the reverse of the directions I'm used to.  I kept to running around the perimeters of parks as much as I could to avoid that.  Parks also had the advantage of being rectangular, which I soon discovered the value of when I had to veer off of them down the city's winding streets, and I ended up doubling back over a mile out of my way.  I eventually found my bearings and managed to get back to the hotel somehow.

Our next stop was Cork, which was slightly smaller and split up among a number of islands.  Our hotel was actually on an island so small that you had to cross its sole bridge to another island in order to really get anywhere.  There were some lovely parks there as well, and one bridge I crossed immediately took me up and up and up a hill, until I was looking down on the entire city (while also keeping an eye out for cars on a narrow road that was flanked by walls where you'd normally expect to find sidewalks).  I got lost a bit again on my way back, but not as badly this time.

After that we headed up to Killarney, which had the biggest park of them all.  Mists were still on the lake as I ran past lounging herds of cows and elk in the early morning.  The presence of large animals and the state of my jet lag-addled brain brought the experience to an almost surreal level.

Fourth up was Limerick.  Or at least that's what the destination was called.  I never saw Limerick, or anything else that would show up on a political map with any degree of detail.  Our hotel was a Radisson in the middle of farm country, which happened to have the cocktail reception of a wedding going on in its lobby as I headed out in my exercise clothes, feeling so out of place that I actually started to be a little proud of it.  The run consisted of me running up a road for two miles without hitting an intersection, then running back for two miles along the very same road.  There weren't any sidewalks or shoulders, and the bushes grew high on either side of the road, so I had to rely heavily on drivers' ability to see me as they came around a bend before splattering me onto the pavement.

Limerick was the last stop on the tour proper, so from there we piled into rental cars at Shannon Airport and headed north to Strandhill in County Sligo---the nearest place to my great grandmother's hometown that had sizable accommodations.  Right after we checked into the hotel I had my most beautiful run yet---nothing but picturesque countryside set between the mountains and the sea.  There was even a bike lane, which gave me some breathing room from the cars.  At one point I hit a fork that gave me the choice of running back on the side of the mountain I'd come from or circumnavigating it, and I regret that I didn't quite have time to take the longer route.

The last destination had what would prove to be the most challenging run of all: Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.  We stayed at a hotel that was literally right next door to the Causeway, known for its unique seaside rock formations that resembled five- and six-sided crystals.  We all had fun hopping around them after our tour.  When I asked about hours for the Causeway at the front desk, I learned that the waterfront and the trails around it were always open, and that what we'd payed admission for was essentially just access to the Visitor's Center.  That's when I hatched my scheme to run as much of the shorefront as I could the next morning.

From what I was able to learn about the waterfront, there was no way that I was going to go all the way along it.  The full system of trails extended for 33 miles, which is far beyond the limits of even my insanity.  I ended up going only about eight and a half miles, but within that space I went from beaches to dizzying five-hundred-foot-tall cliffs, past railroad tracks and around golf course, and up and down dramatic undulations so steep that I had to slow to a walk even when going downhill in some places.  The mist turned to drizzle, until I wasn't sure how much of the water soaking me was rain and how much of it was sweat.  I finally stopped and turned around when I came across a pack of rams that was drinking from a pool at the edge of one of the cliffs.  They'd somehow managed to get beyond the fence that separated the trail from the farmland beyond (though I should note here that there wasn't any similar barrier between the trail and the sheer drop a few feet away from it).  The rams started to trot away when I saw them, and rather than follow in pursuit I decided that my madness had driven me far enough, so I ran back to the the hotel.

The runs were only a small part of the vacation, and I have an avalanche of memories from it that I'm still frantically trying to copy all down into a journal.  Seeing as how I've already passed a thousand words here though, I think I'd better wrap this entry up and save the rest for another time.

The Future of 750 Words

I saw this morning that 750 Words is on its way to becoming a pay site.  I'm already paying a monthly donation (one that's slightly larger than what the site's going to cost), so it won't have much of an effect on me, but I do wonder how it's generally going to change the landscape around here.

It would be nice to finally be able to download all my writing in some format for archival purposes, although I don't know exactly what that format would be.  Plus, there's always the argument that I could be doing what I'm doing on this site without using the site at all, but without the site I don't believe I would've gotten this far.  I need a support system, even if it's just an automated one.  If I'm just throwing a bunch of words into a document somewhere it's harder for me to see the value of it, and besides I've grown addicted to seeing my daily stats.

The main reason I've been considering downloading all my work here (regardless of whether it's offered as an option by the site), is that I'd like to be able to search through it all for specific references to events in the past, and I'd also like to have the security of knowing that I have my work backed up in a more permanent form than just having it on this site's servers somewhere, the future of websites being as ephemeral a thing as it is.  Having my own copy would also make it easier to transfer these notes to future generations someday, somehow.  I'd never considered myself the kind of person to have a journal before (other than my few abortive attempts over the years), and 750 Words has changed that for me.  (There are other things I don't usually consider myself to be that I constantly have to keep reminding myself about, such as being an adult, a married man, and a person with facial hair)

I sometimes wonder how long I'll continue writing these entries, and whether I'll just lose my momentum or become too busy for them one of these days.  Momentum certainly doesn't seem to be a problem for me these days---my entries usually flow out in less than twenty minutes, especially when I'm not writing with the intent of posting my work on a blog.

I hope the new pricing plan works out for Buster, the guy who runs 750 Words.  I'm sure there must be a price for hosting such huge quantities of text, and the repository just keeps growing day by day.  I myself have been using the site for just over a year now, and I'm approaching 200,000 words just by myself.  I'm even happy with some of those words!

In other news, I'm thinking of submitting the beginning of my revised manuscript to a grant program for emerging New York City writers.  The deadline is the 15th, and I still have some polishing to do before then, but I at least have finally managed to wrestle Scrivener into compiling my chapters into a format that I'm happy with.  Granted, my vampire story has no illusions of high art, but I think it's fairly solid so far, and the latest feedback I've gotten from my wife (herself a difficult judge to please, especially with regard to writing) has made me feel even better about it.  I have room to fit in one more chapter, which is a new one that I haven't finished writing yet.  (The story is complete, but I'm adding additional episodes along the way to flesh it out more and expand its world)  I may also send a copy to my parents when I'm done, since they've been coming after me for ages to see some of these tens of thousands of words I pour onto pages every November (though it's hard to say just how many of the remaining words were in the first draft I wrote three years ago).

I'm in a good place right now.  My marriage is blissful, my work is steady, the winter hasn't been as cold as some, my marathon training's continuing apace, and, most importantly, I haven't let all that contentment make me lazy in other aspects of my life.  I have a good feeling about this year so far, and this is in February---a notoriously difficult month to stay positive during.  We'll see how things play out in the months to come...

Once upon a Time...

When I look back on the course my life took as a teenager, it's amazing to think that I ever took up running, or writing for that matter (especially writing a blog).

In the case of running I'd always enjoyed sprinting through crowded places like malls, but I never had very much endurance.  This fact was driven home when I joined the "polar bears" in high school, which was a gym program where students ran progressively longer distances outdoors in progressively colder temperatures as fall turned into winter.  I think they topped out in the neighborhood of three or five miles.  For my part, I found just one mile to be a struggle.  I'd push for about a quarter mile, then have to take a long break, then try pushing again.  It was getting so that I wouldn't even be able to complete the class's mileage before we had to go back inside, so eventually I gave up and switched over to the weightlifting class, where I could go at my own pace and stay in relative warmth.  I remember lifting the entire rack on the squat machine in that class, which my young back fortunately survived.

Then there was the writing, which I had a couple of odd experiences with in middle school.  The first was when I took an admissions test for a specialized school and had to write an essay, which was something I'd never done formally in my life.  I had a vague notion that an essay was like a story, so in order to write mine---on the topic of the difference between intelligence and wisdom---I told a clumsy allegory that heavily ripped off a scene from The Princess Bride.  Needless to say, I did not get into that school.

Then a year or two later I took a summer writing course out in the wilds of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  I'd done other courses through the program the two previous summers---in math and computer programming---and had a pretty good time both those years.  Math and computers have always come easily to me, and beyond that I fondly recall setting many a high score on the Star Wars pinball machine in the tiny mall across the road from the college campus where the program took place.  That year it was different though.  I thought I had gone there to write stories, but it turned out that they expected us to write nonfiction.  Nonfiction about our own lives.  I panicked.  What had I ever done that was interesting enough to write about?  I didn't know the first thing about structure, or choosing an event that represented a theme.  And there was so much reading we had to do...  After only a few days I couldn't take it anymore, and went to see my resident advisor about dropping out.  He said that I wouldn't be able to leave unless I was considered a suicide risk, so I went so far as to say that I was seriously thinking about killing myself.  He let me play Doom on his computer that evening while my parents were contacted.  They picked me up the next day, and took me to Action Park (which I've since learned was something of a death trap) to cheer me up.  I recovered, but I never did go back to that program again (though that may not have been my choice to make---my parents kept those kinds of details away from me back then).

Looking back on those experiences, the high school running I can live with, since that was long before I discovered how to breathe steadily and pace myself (which they didn't really give us much help with in the class).  Maybe I'd have been able to accomplish something in track and field on the academic circuit if I started running earlier in my life, but then again that could just be wishful thinking, and at any rate I'm really happy with where I am with it now.

The writing, though...  It bothered me then, and it still bothers me now.  Granted, it came at a time in my life when I was bullied relentlessly, to the point where I developed an instinctive fear of expressing myself.  Even so I wish I'd found a way to stick it out, especially given how dramatic the circumstances of my exit were.  I've learned the most in my life from the situations where I've gone out of my way to make myself uncomfortable---to shake up my routine and try new things.  But even that realization wouldn't come to me until many years later, so maybe I shouldn't be so hard on thirteen-year-old me.  There are only two things I know for sure.  The first is that there's nothing I miss about being that young, naive, selfish, and lost.  The second is that I now have events in my life worth writing about (and probably always did).

Regarding Arrogant Jerkiness

My wife wondered about that "arrogant jerk" comment I made about myself in the last entry I posted to my blog.  When she pressed me for an example of that happening, I couldn't come up with one.  Now I'm starting to wonder whether those perceptions were mostly based on me reading my past writing and thinking what an arrogant jerk the guy who wrote it must have been.  Granted, that persona was trapped in a world of his own mind most of the time, but it grates on me just to know that I used to think that way.  But maybe I didn't even think that way, and was just bad at expressing myself in words.  That certainly explains why I didn't (and still don't) talk too much, even though I don't consider myself to be a shy person.  I'm still trying to find my words.  I can pump out forty a minute now when I do my daily entries, and I've gotten better about just letting them flow instead of getting stuck on trying to find the perfect phrasing for everything.  I still write slower when I think I'm going to post something to the blog though.  I feel I have to be more careful if there's a chance that other people are going to read what I'm writing.  To a certain degree that makes sense, since I know how much grammatical gaffes and inarticulate phrasing bother me when I'm reading, and I wouldn't want to inflict that on anyone else if I could help it.  But it's still a form of self-censorship, and I have to be wary of that.

...And Doggone It, People LIKE Me!

I've been reading a book by Lawrence Block, Write for Your Life, which has had a lot of great advice so far that can be applied not just to writing, but also to a wide variety of other creative pursuits.  It's reintroduced me to the concept of affirmations.  You know what I'm talking about: writing positive statements out repeatedly, or reciting them to yourself in a mirror (calling to mind Al Franken's Stuart Smalley sketches from SNL back in the day).  It seems like a good idea that a lot of people could benefit from, but I haven't gotten around to really trying it myself.  Part of that is just not thinking about it when I have the time to try it, but I think there's also an element of concern in there.

As I look back across my life, I've found that when things go well for me long enough, and my confidence gets raised high enough, I tend to turn into somewhat of an arrogant jerk.  It's not that I mean to put other people down, but there's a point at which I stop paying enough attention to other people's feelings, and that inevitably sets me up for a fall.

So how do I deal with that?  Should I try to temper my feelings, and never become too confident in myself?  There's a part of me that fears affirmations could have a disastrous effect on my ego.  (And there's another part of me that thinks I'd look just plain silly talking to myself in front of a mirror, of course)  But is that the kind of thinking that's holding be back from being successful as a writer?  Should my affirmation be "Success with my writing will not make me a bad person"?  Or would it be arrogant to presume success at this point?  In some ways it feels like saying I'll remember the little people when I win the lottery.  Surely it can't be THAT random, though.  A big part of success comes from desire.  A lot of people aren't successful because they can't find the energy or the self confidence to commit to their goals strongly enough.  There's that "self confidence" thing again.

In a bizarre way, I see Martin Scorsese's movie The King of Comedy as an inspiration.  Sure it's about a madman who resorts to kidnapping in pursuing his dreams of show business success, and sure a lot of the scenes of Robert De Niro pushing himself on people are intensely uncomfortable.  But how many of us have the guts to be so self-assured that we can just walk right up to the people capable of fulfilling our dreams and ask that they do so?  Maybe the character's methods in the movie are highly suspect, but he's still doing more that most of us do.  It all comes down to reinforcing our beliefs enough to take risks, and maybe affirmations could help me and a great many of us to accomplish that.  We just need to be careful not to overreach.  You can't tell when you've gone over the line though until you reach it.  Maybe it's time to think more about just getting to that line in the first place.  Mirror, here I come!  I apologize in advance.