When I grow up

May 7, 2013 //
3
Indiana Jones

Indiana Jones, PMA-er

When I was little I wanted to be Indiana Jones. I don’t mean that I wanted to be an archeologist. I mean I actually wanted to be Indiana Jones. Smart, witty, willing to get his hands dirty (“If you want to be a good archaeologist, you gotta get out of the library”), cynical, romantic. He created his own persona and then lived it. Growing up, there were no really badass women characters to emulate—eventually Lara Croft emerged and despite loving her I knew even at age 10 that she was a sex symbol. That took something very important away from her. (I would argue that sex symbol status is different from sexiness. In the former it’s something placed upon you, usually with the intent to commodify, where as sexiness is something you control and actively take ownership of. It comes from within rather than from external sources and can be independent of normative standards of beauty. But I digress.)

Then after that, I just assumed I would be a “businesswoman.” I didn’t really know what that meant, outside of collecting frequent flyer miles and playing golf on Sundays. That’s actually what I thought it mostly was, although I did have a basic understanding that between those I would have to go to the “office” and “work.” But those were abstract terms that I couldn’t visualize, even after going to “Take Your Daughter to Work” days at JP Morgan in Manhattan. Forget the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, this is how I know that I grew up in the shadow of 1990s Wall Street.

And now I’m grown up and I’m not sure what I want to do. Business has changed dramatically since my dad was teaching me to play golf so I wouldn’t miss out on informal business deals (thank god. I’m terrible at golf). I have two English degrees. I’m an INFP so naturally I want to save the world, although I’m not sure how. Mostly, I just want to run and read and write. The new “three Rs.”

This is ok for now, I think. I am giving myself a new mission.

It is to open myself up to opportunities, until I can figure out my next steps.

So I am learning how to invest. I am learning how to use my DSLR. I finally started a training plan leading up to my next 50K in October, to improve my running. I am taking a nutrition course online and actually paying attention. I am also working on my writing. By doing it. And again, by taking an online course.

I like online courses. Yesterday on NPR Laura Linney said, if I could stay in school forever I probably would (I’m paraphrasing). I feel the same way. I probably need to expand my horizons. Life is school, not the other way around. I keep telling myself I’m going to go out there and take photographs! Wherever there is.

James Altucher just wrote about PMA. Prepare, Make it happen, Accept the outcome. I need to PMA!

One day I will stop thinking, oh that is a good idea of James Altucher’s, and actually put his ideas into practice. Hey, maybe one day I’ll be Indiana Jones.

Categories Career, Finding Yourself, Women

I am the worst girlfriend

May 1, 2013 //
1

But before I tell you why here’s a photograph from the’80s-themed birthday party I threw for Rory two weeks ago when he turned 30:

Rory's party

We all had blue tongues because the cake my dad and I had made was about 80% food coloring

And that is just so you know I’m not always a terrible, terrible person. Ok? Ok.

I may have gotten Rory evicted from his apartment.

You know. The one spitting-distance from his work (and he just bought a bike so he can cycle every morning). The one that is among the few in that town within his budget.

Oops.

And I wish I had at least done something interesting to get him evicted. After all, we’ve had sex in the hot tub at my apartment complex, which is certainly in view of lots of people’s windows (oh come on! You know people do it! That’s what you pay the maintenance team for, to kill the nasty sex germs in the communal hot tub). But it wasn’t that.

It wasn’t for smoking crack with homeless girls in the parking lot. It wasn’t even for being a dick to one of his neighbors.

Nope. It was because I let my dog walk* from the car to his apartment** without a leash.

The truth is Rory has told me off for this before, because he’s been told off by the property manager, whose apparent mission in life is to basically be a Nazi when it comes to unleashed dogs. (He certainly doesn’t spend much time doing/overseeing handy work. We generally do not care much for this property manager.) I am kind of a nightmare dog owner, I guess, because I’m pretty laissez faire with a leash. But I always make sure no one is around. And Ninja has good recall when it comes down to matters of life and death.

She would definitely come back to me straight away if I caught her smoking crack with homeless girls in the parking lot. Man, would she be in trouble.

But right now I’m in trouble.

I hate that. I hate being in the wrong. I hate that I did something pretty innocuous that I’m really not that sorry for and it got my boyfriend kicked out of his place. I even groveled to the property manager in an email. If there’s one thing I hate more than being wrong it’s groveling.

Rory called me after two days of not speaking to me. “And what did you learn?” He wasn’t as angry after those two days. If you get your boyfriend evicted, it’s definitely a good idea to leave him alone until he’s ready to talk to you again (not a good idea, however, to point out that leash laws go against small government Conservatism when your boyfriend blames the circumstances of your negligence on your radical liberalism).

“I learned that some people are just assholes and you have to do what they say so that you don’t drop the people you love in the shit.”

 Close enough, right?

Rory and Harriet at Rory's party

 

*ok, run

**ok, run like a beast possessed from the car to the tree to the other tree to the apartment. She was just checking for squirrels!

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Categories Love and Dating

What we learned in Knoxville

April 8, 2013 //
0

There may be no crying in baseball, but crying is certainly allowed in running. You may not cry but there are definitely times when every runner feels like maybe they will because it hurts so much.

It’s easy to say that running is a rewarding experience when it builds you up. Maybe you run your first ultra and place second and someone hands you a $100 bill. Maybe you place first, or second, or even third in your age group. Or maybe you just go for an early morning run and it is just you and your thoughts, and you feel free. You have a salubrious, spiritual, or maybe even metaphysical experience. As anyone who has ever seen one of those “Running: Cheaper than therapy” tshirts and given it a silent nod knows, running will keep you from going crazy.

But it can also make you crazy, so don’t let your plethoric thoughts on those good days inflate your ego by too much. You have a bad run, then another one, and then another one, and you think, well this is it, I’ve lost it. You try to figure out what you’re doing wrong but the answer eludes you. Your goals are, generally, to run faster and over greater distances and some days it feels like you can do it, not just soon but consistently.

Then you travel to Knoxville for their marathon and it crushes you.

This weekend my friends and I drove across the Appalachian Mountains to Tennessee. It should have been a dead giveaway when our ears started popping in the car as the altitude increased, but we only acknowledged this briefly and kept going.

At the start, we were in good spirits. Melissa and I both want to qualify for Boston eventually, and we know it’s possible. It was a beautiful day and Knoxville is a very pretty city. At the sound of the gun we started plodding along with the masses, and quickly got ahead of the 3:45 pacer. Neither one of us felt a hundred percent, so if we weren’t going to BQ we thought we could at least get a decent time. Under four hours, for sure.

When we crossed the timing strip at the halfway point, the clock read 1:52. Not bad. But the course had been much hillier than we expected, and we could tell we were both struggling. In fact, just before one excruciatingly steep hill a man was beating a drum, as if to mark our march to the executioner’s block. My legs were burning. I didn’t think I could I make it all the way to mile 26, even to crawl the last two tenths of a mile.

When Melissa turned to me at some point during mile 16 and said, “I don’t think I can make it. Do you want to walk?” I was relieved. Really, I would have been ok if she had said, do you want me to shoot you in the head? Except that I wanted my finisher’s medal. There are all sorts of reasons to run, but don’t underestimate the motivational power of those damn medals.

We did walk. In fact, we walked about 7 miles of the Knoxville Marathon. And not quickly, either. But we laughed. We wondered where the 4:00 pacer was, because surely we had fallen behind that pace by now. When he reached us we tried to hang on to his pace, and he acknowledged that yes, Knoxville is pretty hilly. Then we gave up and let him go on ahead until he was out of our sight. We decided we were no longer marathoners, but tourists, and I took a photo to Instagram later. I also decided to work on my tan. A few people, as they passed us, shouted words of encouragement to us, like “You’re still doing great!” and we shouted back, “We just want a beer!” Which we got, at mile 22, from possibly the most lovely woman on the planet (who knew a Miller Light could taste so good?!).

Chafe now

A marine joined us on our walk, too. He was also beat, and decided our finishing time would be our “mountain PR”, and we decided that was fine with us. He had come from Baton Rouge and extolled the benefits of flat terrain. After walking for what felt like forever, we mustered up the reserve to run the final two miles. The 4:45 pacer had just reached us, and we decided that at least we could stay ahead of her. We ran across a bridge and through downtown Knoxville, where the locals were brunching on café patios but put down their forks for a moment to cheer us on, and various artists had created vibrant images on the ground in chalk. Those were a long two miles. But we did make it, crossing the finish line in the middle of Neyland Stadium.

Knoxville was an extremely well-organized race, and the day was perfect weather-wise. It kicked our butts, but not our spirits. Sometimes when the marathon wins, it reminds you why you started running in the first place. Not to achieve just one time, but for the experience: for the camaraderie, for the excuse to go to new cities, to support others when they’re having an exceptionally good day or an exceptionally bad one. Because either way, you know how they feel.

Crying is allowed in running. But sometimes you cry because you’re laughing so hard.

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Categories Finding Yourself, Health & Fitness

Mothers’ daughters

March 25, 2013 //
0

Originally posted on May 21, 2012.

When I was 16, and in the middle of an eating disorder, scrawnier than I thought although less delicate, my mother decided to have liposuction on her thighs. I didn’t believe in liposuction, but only because I was repulsed that someone could take shortcuts to being thin when I couldn’t. My dad was away on business on the day of her appointment, and I was home from boarding school, so I had to be her “person”, to get her home safely even though with only a learner’s permit I was a nervous driver (I wouldn’t get a full license until I was 22).

We arrived at the surgeon’s office, and they took her away somewhere, to de-robe, prep, whatever it is they do to you before— then while—they suck out your hated fat cells. Not too much later, when it was over, I took her to the car and sat her down in the passenger’s seat. She was still very drowsy with drugs and wearing a garment that kept her cut-up legs together. Her legs would swell, they said, and maybe the wounds would weep for a while. And in that moment I was her “person,” but I didn’t feel like she was mine. She didn’t see me but often she would look at me and say, “You’re so lovely and thin.”

I felt swallowed up then, in her self-loathing, in mine. At 25 and maybe twenty pounds (maybe more) heavier, I could get my own liposuction now, on my thighs, on my stomach, on my arms. I could get lipo on all those places and end up with a fat head. But getting that done is not the same as being in control, and it doesn’t make you love yourself, it doesn’t make you more worthy or more valuable, although it may help the doctor promise you those things on a spanking new billboard.

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Categories Anxiety, Essays, Finding Yourself, Health & Fitness, Women

What to think about on an early morning run

March 22, 2013 //
2

It is nice, to just be alone sometimes, with your thoughts and your footsteps. Sometimes I can’t concentrate on anything over my heart exploding in my ears: tha-thump! tha-thump! tha-thump! Then I try to make my heart beat more slowly, the way Henry Sugar teaches himself to see through playing cards just by meditating. Slow, down. 1, 2. 1, 2. I want my heart rate to be very, very low, so that when I go to the doctor and the nurse takes my pulse she will exclaim, are you even alive?! And I would say, no I’m a vampire, and I used to go to the top of the hill in Whitby, where St. Mary’s Church is, like any good vampire would (and not because that is near where my grandparents live and they liked to drag us there for “fun” days out). And now I’m just very old and very tired of these outrageous health care costs.

But I don’t even know what my resting heart rate is. And I get too nervous at the doctor, so it always shoots up, and of course everyone knows you can’t make your heart beat slower just by wanting it. That’s not the way the human body was made to work. The way our bodies work is as miraculous as anything, maybe more so. Can the way gases make the stars shine so we can see them from millions of miles below and are reminded of diamonds, or the way foxes are almost impossible to domesticate but when in the rare case we succeed they begin to wag their tails like dogs, be as miraculous as the way our blood vessels light up like a highway at night across our heart on an angiogram? I don’t know. I don’t know anything about these things, or anything, really.

Mmm, I wish I could drink coffee before a run, but no, it is too big of a risk. Too big of a risk that maybe that will happen, you know what I mean. Even though I drink almost a pot of coffee a day, and really, I would drink more if I didn’t stop myself, especially right before bed when I always crave it, except that I value my sleep too much. And my intestine. My mom right now has a leak, inside somewhere– and if you ask me it’s probably from only eating granola bars and drinking coffee to stay thin, so I should really be careful. But I do wish I could drink coffee while I was running. If I could drink coffee while running, in exactly 45 degree weather, while Tom Ashbrook personally read this week’s New Yorker to me (“whadaya know?”), with Ninja, then that would be a perfect morning. Which is proof perfect does not exist.

I wonder if Rory has eaten that Cadbury’s Crème Egg that I bought him yet. Really, it’s been weeks; I could have eaten that thing 50 times over now, even if I hadn’t really wanted it. But how could you not want a Crème Egg?!

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Categories Essays

Update

March 20, 2013 //
1

Feb 4

Harriet May <harri.may@gmail.com>

To P.

I’m still rubbish at job-hunting, but I did my first ultramarathon on Saturday, a 50K, in 4:23:11 which put me in second place, and I won $100. That’s not a good enough time to be really good, but it’s a start. And I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to realize this, but I run exactly how you would expect an INFP to run. I just run what I feel. On every run. No matter what training plans say or what distance I’m running or anything. Oh and I gave up on the med student and started dating a track coach, which perhaps is not good for future earning potential but at least I can delegate thinking about the numbers involved in running to him.

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Categories Letters, Love and Dating

The ultramarathon and equal ground for women

March 19, 2013 //
3
This is what I look like running 31 miles, so 50 is really not going to be pretty

This is what I look like running 31 miles, so 50 is really not going to be pretty

I want to run a 50-miler. Eventually.

That is 19 miles longer than I’ve ever run at one time before, and I know very well how far 19 miles is. What I do not know is how far 19 miles feels after already having gone 31. A lot, I would think.

But the most intriguing thing about getting up there into serious ultramarathons (besides the bragging rights, which is a given), is that as the mileage increases, the playing field between men and women begins to level out. This is the most appealing thing to me, because women are still not quite equal to men nowadays, in most things.

This is a sad truth. Not when it comes to performance in sport, necessarily; women typically have smaller cardiovascular systems and carry more fat, and these are merely physiological facts. But socially we still have such a long way to go.

Just look at the rape case in Steubenville, where two high-school footballers sexually assaulted one of their peers while she was inebriated, and unable to respond. In fact, she only learned of the assault in the days and weeks to follow by way of social media, and there was even one photo of herself, in which she was unclothed and lying on the floor “like a rag doll that had been flung over”, that she saw for the first time only during the trial. Justly, the verdict came back guilty. But the case highlights how many young men see women not as human beings but as objects to be used for sexual entertainment and consumption:

The sexually consenting, female subject, who has sexual agency and control, is a bold legacy of the women’s movement, and she’s imperiled today. While it’s true, and consoling, that the Ohio rapists sparked outrage among many who followed the case, that outrage after the fact needs to be balanced against the casual, blasé violation of the young woman during the crime itself, as revealed in a real-time text and Twitter record of how little the rapists observed, noted, or cared about their victim’s humanity.

Because even as disturbing and headline-grabbing as the sexual violence against women is in India, for example, where most recently a British tourist jumped out of a window to get away from a lecherous hotel manager, it’s something that is faced by women right here, everyday, as if it’s “no big deal.” During college I worked in a restaurant for a man who enjoyed telling me that I looked like a woman in some porn film he had just watched, and who would stand behind me while I was slicing bread for the tables making suggestive gestures behind my back. There was nothing I could do, except quit, which I did as soon as I had another job. The things he did to me were done to make me feel inferior, and the experience was mortifying.

When our own bodies are assumed not to have the same level as autonomy as that of men’s bodies, we are given an added burden, to be responsible not only for our own actions, but for those of the men around us too. And despite the work being done to change these societal views, the road is going to be a long one.

And so I come back to the ultramarathon. Where we have the opportunity to prove our strength. Where we take back control of our bodies. Where we are equal.

I am excited about running 50 miles.

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Categories Essays, Women

I choose my best self

March 18, 2013 //
0

Sometimes I wonder what people would say about me if I were to die suddenly (being hit by a car while running, probably. I’m not a very good pedestrian and most people are not very good drivers, which surely is a deadly combination. Or something a little more 1,000 Ways to Die, perhaps, like getting so caught up in trying to pull up the stubborn zip on my coat, I mean, don’t you hate that, when that little flappy bit of your coat gets caught in the zipper part, and then you can’t move the zip up or down, on the way out of the mall after Christmas shopping, that I don’t notice the escalator and I trip and suddenly my hair is caught in the machine and I’m scalped. Ok, so maybe that’s a little graphic. And anyway, I do all my holiday shopping online). Would Rory, for example, admit—through his inconsolable grief, of course—that I was the craziest girl he ever dated? That I was always crying about being fat while begging for sex? That I became his personal spammer, inundating his email inbox with links to articles that I think he may like, because for me an Internet connection is an umbilical cord?

And Rory is a brave, brave man for dating me in the first place. I have two portraits of myself in my head, my best self and my worst self, and I oscillate between the two. There is no middle ground. On days that I can visualize myself at my best—smart, social, witty, charming, magnetic—I can become those things, or at least get closer to becoming them. On those days I get complimented on my smile, and chatted up in the dog park. On days I can’t see past my worst self, I scowl a lot, and sometimes I won’t get out of bed, but will lay there, describing how my body is going sink into the mattress and decompose there, while a perplexed Rory tries to humor me. Of course, I didn’t mention any of this on my online dating profile, so really he couldn’t have known what he was getting himself into.

I don’t think the fascination with death is any big deal. My mother has always subscribed to the local newspaper, but only scans the headlines before engrossing herself in the obituaries (and threatening my death, if I touch her crossword puzzle before she’s gotten to it). Because, really, do I care if I’m dead? No, not really. I mean, not to be weird about it—I don’t want to die. I want to see season 3 of Girls and smoke cigars on the beach in the summer. But I like what James Altucher has to say on the matter, which is to say, don’t live every day like it’s your last, live it like it’s everyone else’s last, then:

- be kind to them

- try to help them be less stressed

- try to fulfilll their dreams for the day

- not talk badly about them. Don’t talk badly about someone about to die. Too soon!

- Hug them if it’s appropriate. Or kiss them. Not the people I’m going to “business” with later. That might be too much. But I will be nice to them anyway.

- Really listen to them. I will listen to everyone’s last words today without interrupting them. Even if I can finish their sentence because I am light years ahead of them I will let them finish their sentences without my stupid voice piercing the air with its presumption.

- Learn from them. I will picture as if some universal life force is speaking to me through everyone else. I will listen carefully for clues that I can piece together later. These are the only clues that god will ever give me so don’t interrupt.

- Don’t opinionate all over them. What does it matter if I change their minds today? Do they really need my fantastic thoughts? They are going to die anyway.

And you have to remember that some people are more aware of their mortality than others, and are still doing amazing things. If you never click on links in blog posts, you should really break that rule and click on that last one. Not to be hokey about it, but it will inspire you. And in the meantime, I am going to try to worry less about dumb things, and work harder at being my best self. And a better, not-so-crazy girlfriend.

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Categories Anxiety, Essays, Finding Yourself, Love and Dating

How to find your focus

March 13, 2013 //
2

I know it’s a lot more difficult to see what you should be doing, than seeing what other people should be doing. Which is why I set up a blog for Rory.

“You at least need a landing page,” I told him. “In case someone googles you.”

All the information that comes up about him in an online search is outdated. I know this because I Googled him. But not until after our first date.

And I know how important it is to be known for your ideas, and how relatively easy in the age of the Internet. It’s like Adam Gopnik said in the New Yorker this week:

Thanks to the Internet, the disproportion between writerly supply and demand, always tricky, has tipped: anyone can write, and everyone does, and beginners are expected to be the last pure philanthropists, giving it all away for the naches.

Of course, the point Gopnik is making is that it is so much harder to be a writer these days, because everyone is giving away content for free. And how do you compete with free? Even Andrew Sullivan is experimenting with this. But at the same time it is so much easier to use writing to promote yourself as something else. Like a track coach, maybe?

(My incentive here, of course, is to advance Rory’s career enough so that he can make decent money faster, because I’m not sure how employable I am and well, if we stay together, he’s going to realize that I need new Mizunos every two months. And they ain’t cheap.)

So I wrote a few posts for Rory, as his sort-of ghostwriter, based on conversations we’ve had. And it scared me that I found it easier to write as him, about his work, than it was for me to write as myself. Which of course is silly, but the difference was focus. And I realized that even though our types of running are different (track vs. long distance), running was what I love doing more than anything right now, while I’m figuring out everything else. Running is my focus.

When Penelope Trunk graduated from college, she asked herself: “What do I want to do most in the world, if I could do anything?” And so she went to California to play professional beach volleyball.

I’m still not sure what my answer to that question is. Sometimes I do want to quit my job and go work in a running store. Maybe I should. But in the meantime, I have something to write about.

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Categories Finding Yourself, Writing

Coping with demons

March 11, 2013 //
1

My demons have shown up again.

Even running 40-50 miles a week, and lifting weights on top of that, I still struggle to keep my weight where I want it. I am overwhelmed by thinking, deciding, obsessing over food. I am overwhelmed by the guilt comes with it: that I have the luxury to worry about how I look and how much I weigh, when I should be thankful that I have a body that not only works, but is strong enough to run all those miles.

I was doing well, before Christmas. I felt good. Like maybe I was finally, finally close to being on track, with my running and my self-esteem and my life. And now I’m struggling again.

Rory said to me the other day, you have such soft hands. And I joked that it was all that hard labor I do. My hands weren’t made to work, perhaps, but my feet were, and I have the calluses to prove it. I like that, though. I am pieced together by parts that are so fragile that they’d be torn apart by the slightest bit of pressure, and parts that could withstand anything. On the outside, but inside as well.

My demons have shown up again, so I guess we’re going to have to learn to coexist.

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Categories Anxiety, Health & Fitness, Women
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