Rocky Raccoon Race Report

 

First, the good news: I DNF’d my 62-mile race at mile 48 because of an equipment malfunction. The waistlight that had been so reliable through many a prior ultra went kaput for no discernable reason. It’s possible that one of the times during this ultra that I tripped on an exposed root and faceplanted on the trail, the light broke my fall and broke itself in the process. Whatever the reason, I found myself in the woods of Huntsville, Texas, in the dark, caked with dirt and sweat, calorie deprived and exhausted, like some reality TV survival candidate without even a stupid bow drill to make fire.

I say this is the good news because here I am – obviously I made it. And the reason I made it is because people who participate in ultras, whether as runners or volunteers or crew to their crazy friends, cannot help being helpful, cannot resist providing aid, will cheer on everyone from the hardcore speedsters to the nervous nubes with the kind of genuine enthusiasm that lights even the darkest depths of my misanthropic soul. Sometimes literally.

As soon as I realized my light wasn’t working, I inched my way toward a cluster of tents festooned with Christmas lights and asked some shadowy figures where I was, counting on those shadows being people and not trees or bears. They were people. At first they thought I was suffering from the fog-brain that occurs in the mid-to-late stages of an ultra and gently told me “the trail is that way” and “there’s an aid station just a mile away.” I further explained: I needed my husband to bring me a backup for my dead light, so I needed to let him know where I was. They sprang into action: dropped him a pin, got me a Coke and some mandarin oranges, asked if I was cold and needed a blanket or a seat by their firepit while I waited. “I think I’ll stay here forever!” I thought excitedly. A lovely fantasy, but I had paid money for this suffer fest, so when Ken brought the replacement light, I thanked my benefactors and set off again.

Problem was I hadn’t charged the replacement the night before, given that I was counting on my go-to waistlight. (I can’t do headlights; my skull is an eggshell and anything tighter than a winter beanie gives me a headache.) After only another couple of miles, I found myself in darkness yet again. I stood there listening to the chirping frogs and wondering if any of them would invite me to their campfire. Probably not. The chirping meant they were only interested in each other. I sighed and waited for another benefactor to appear.

One did, of course, a guy with a waistlight like a tiny sun. He was walking, thank goodness, and not that fast, because otherwise I’d never be able to keep up and he’d feel compelled to slow down for me. Because no matter what, I knew this person was going to help me – and he did. I explained my situation and said I needed to get to the next section of trail close to the road so I could call my husband yet again. He not only welcomed my company but also knew the trail so well he could tell me exactly how far we had to go. He was doing the hundred miler, not just the 100k like I was (yeah, I said “just”), and had gotten to mile 82, and when I think about that, about how much he’d been through that day, I can’t believe how tolerant he was as I prattled on about running and mandarin oranges and frogs and all sorts of nonsense. I kept apologizing for holding him back and he kept assuring me he was quite happy to walk, especially since he was normally a slow walker and I was a decently fast one so I could keep him going. I don’t know if that was true but he had to be a pretty badass ultrarunner given how far along he was – and given that his previous race, the Uwharrie 100, boasts 19,000 feet of elevation gain, because running 100 miles is just too easy.

I got to a well-lit area on the road and once again thanked my most recent benefactor. This time, I knew my race was over; I had no more backups. Disappointing, but I’ve collected a lot of DNFs over my running career and I’ve weirdly come to prefer enjoyable failures to stressful successes. I had fun that day. The weather was sunny and mild, I had a good audiobook, the woods were pretty, and even though I only (yes, I said “only”) did about 48 miles, I could still eat a lot of food the next few days. And of course, my faith in humanity was restored. People are kind. The running community is awesome. Life is good.

Well, I should say momentarily restored. Because now we get to the bad news, which is not new news but ongoing. See, running is simple. Not easy (oh believe me), but simple. You do this thing you love even though you complain about it a lot. You keep doing it because every mile feels like a small victory. Then you pay a bunch of money to do a bunch of miles toward a big victory. People help you and cheer for you and you do the same for them, and there are slices of cold watermelon when it’s hot and steamy cups of ramen when it’s cold, and even when it’s an absolute slog of pain and suffering, you can’t wait to do it again. Running is simple; life is not. I can’t be so naive as to imagine that every member of the running community behaves the same way in the rest of their lives as they do at a race. Not all runners vote the same way. Not all runners share the same view of current events. Go on and call me a wet blanket and a spoilsport, but as we drove through Texas to get to and from the race, there were signs everywhere, literal and figurative, reminding us that anyone we met could be someone who said “they deserved it” and “both sides are at fault” and “why does everything have to be political?” 

Running is simple; life is hard, and simplifying things to deal with the hardness doesn’t actually solve anything. I run these crazy races because I’m extraordinarily lucky. I have time to train, money to pay for shoes, and a serious but relatively benign addiction to endocannabinoids. But I can’t really claim that running has made me a markedly better person. I’ve made some of the best friends of my life through running, friends who also happen to be some of the greatest people I’ve ever known: people who are smart, who think deeply and critically, who check facts and assess sources, who care about the world and actively work to make it better. These people exist everywhere, not just in running. That said, people who think there’s nothing wrong with throwing children into holding pens and shooting unarmed or disarmed people in the face or head while defending proven rapists and pedophiles – these people exist everywhere too, including running, and even if it means being a killjoy, I can’t not think this. To do so seems grossly irresponsible. The running community is great, sure, but does this greatness transcend beyond the trails?

I don’t know. Maybe it could. If a running community can care for all its members, if a city can rally to support all its inhabitants – perhaps a nation can too? But there can’t be any maybe or perhaps about it; it must happen. This is one DNF we can't afford.

Three Stories

 

I’ve been revisiting some of my favorite books on audio, because sometimes there’s no friend like an old friend, and because I need a soothing stream of smart stories flowing through my head as much as possible these days. Oh, I do my fair share of doom-scrolling, hand-wringing, hair-tearing, and general lamentations. I rage. I sob. And then get out my earbuds and running shoes and escape, at least temporarily, as long as my privilege, leg muscles, and phone battery life allow.

One of these favorites is a novel I consider one of the greatest ever written in the English language (and the author’s Nobel Prize in Literature would seem to back me up): Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. If you had to read this in a literature class when you were young, you probably hated it; what teenager would have any interest in the narrative of a “proper English butler” during the years before and after World War II? I did not read it in school but rather well into adulthood, so I was better situated to be stunned by its quiet tragedy. Later readings transformed mere “stunned” into “devastated.” This last encounter rendered me truly shattered.

Stevens, the butler, dedicates his whole life to fulfilling the role of proper English butler to the extent that he can’t not play the role, not even in his own personal narrative (which, in classic Ishiguro style, is magnificently unreliable). Though this may be hard to fathom in our time, it does give him a deep sense of purpose and self-worth, which is what pretty much everyone at every time has sought. Of course, there’s a downside – several of them. Many readers like to focus on Stevens’s repression, the fact that he’s so committed to his role that he can’t allow himself to love, even though there are clear (to the reader) signs that he craves companionship as much as anyone. Sure, but to shake your head over this alone (secure in the knowledge that you would never do that) is to miss the bigger picture, and it’s a picture that should seem very familiar to us right now.

The lord of the house where Stevens serves, as it turns out, was a Nazi sympathizer. Yes, this is a spoiler, but don’t pout; this is not a shocking-plot-twist kind of book, so read it anyway – again if you already have. As Stevens faces the remains of his life, he has to grapple with the fact that he dedicated the bulk of that life to someone who aided and abetted evil. If he played a significant role in supporting that evil, he’s part of it; if, on the other hand, he was “just the butler,” then his life’s work – perhaps his life as a whole – is meaningless. 

How do you live with that? How do you reconcile your sense of self-worth with the possibility that you might be a bad person – or, perhaps just as personally dreadful, that you are insignificant? Well, if you’re Stevens – or if you’re alive today – you construct a narrative that rationalizes everything you’ve done. I work hard. I mean well. I’m a good person, I just didn’t know at the time what was truly going on. He isn’t as bad as all that; he’s done kind things too. People only want to see the bad in him, and they’re hypocrites because they’ve done bad things themselves. But he’s a good person. I’m a good person. But don’t shake your head over this, secure in the knowledge that I’m describing other people, just yet.

The second story I want to talk about is in many ways about as different from Ishiguro’s novel as you can get. Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” takes a third-person objective point of view, compared to the unreliable first person of Stevens, and the short story's spare style contrasts sharply with the rich details of the novel. If you read this one in high school, and chances are you did, you probably liked it. In discussions about it, you probably talked about why these people would go along with such a barbaric ritual every year even though there was a chance they would be the “winner” this time. Why didn’t anyone stop it? And the answer was probably something about conformity, about how people are simply too afraid to pull a Katniss Everdeen and stand against the crowd, even for their loved ones. And there was probably a lot of head shaking. But there’s an element to this story that often gets overlooked, because these are not mere sheeple, but perhaps wolves in sheeple clothing.

At the end of the story, the neighbors who were so cheerfully chatting with Tessie are now, post-lottery picking, grabbing stones with both hands, stones so big they struggle to carry them. There isn’t mere mindless acquiescence here; there’s blood lust. They keep the lottery because they want the lottery. They want someone to single out from themselves to destroy. They do – and we do too. 

Like Stevens, we all want to think of ourselves as good people. But that becomes a trap. If you see yourself as fundamentally good, you’ve got a problem when you’re faced with something you’ve done or not done that isn’t so great. Haul out the old Psych 101 book and take your pick from the chapter on cognitive dissonance: you can rationalize, you can deny, you can sublimate, you can scapegoat. The other side is just as bad. I didn’t realize at the time. You’re a hypocrite by accusing me. I’m not listening to this; I’m going for a run. Heh heh.

Or you can go another way, which brings us to the third story. As you tell the story of your own life, you can create your character not as a “good person” but as someone capable of both kindness and brutality, and you can choose your actions not in terms of how they reflect who you are but how they connect you to the world, and what their results will be in that world. Stop looking in the mirror and start looking out the door, even if, like me, at times you shudder at the idea of what's out there.

But if you’re reading this, you’re the choir to my preaching. You probably know all this already, and like me you’re struggling to figure out how to do something about it. You’ll find no answers here. In my darkest hours I wonder, like Stevens, whether my devotion to books and literature has had an insignificant impact – or, worse, whether it has been a case of full-on denial on my part. Yes, I read good books, so yes, I am good. I vote for the correct side, I rally for the just causes, some of my best friends are. But what has it actually done? How has it actually changed minds that so desperately need changing? Does my story matter at all, or is it just for my own gratification?

Don’t answer that for me. Ask it of yourself instead.

Into that good night

 

I watched my own father go gentle into that good night. I will tell you about it, but not just yet.

Dylan Thomas was a young man when he wrote his famous villanelle. For that matter, he was only 39 when he died. Poets.org describes him as “the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination,” which seems a bit sardonic. Nevertheless, “Do not go gentle into that good night” deserves its fame, taking a form so prone to become sing-song silliness and elevating it to the point where everyone else should just stop writing villanelles (please), as D.T. did it to perfection.

That said, like many a famous English Lit poem, it is often misread. Just as Robert Frost’s “The road not taken” has become the anthem of misguided would-be nonconformists (yet even the title itself tells another story – look at the whole poem, folks, and think about it some), Thomas’s poem somehow makes some readers believe that angry-young-man-rage is the antidote to meek submission.

Folks. Look at the whole.

First off, and every teacher of literature has said this so many times it ought to be its own villanelle refrain: “Do not mistake the author of a verse / for its speaker, for oh! Nothing is worse.” Poets, I daresay, rarely give advice. Even if they did, you’d do well to take it warily – Dylan Thomas’s author photograph alone requires an MPA content warning (cigarette smoking!). Does Thomas really want his father to sit bolt upright on his deathbed, shake tight fists at the heavens, and roar curses that bring the poem’s MPA rating up to R? Even if we separate poet from poem’s speaker, who would want that? Is impotent rage really so much better than yielding acceptance of the inevitable?

These were not questions that occurred to me when I thought about this poem after my father’s passing. What occurred to me is harder to describe – which is perhaps one reason we have poets.

I say this to everyone who sends condolences: he went peacefully, without pain, in a familiar setting with his family right with him. It’s all true, and it describes possibly the best scenario in which you could ever lose an elderly loved one. There’s a little more to it than that, though; it was peaceful because he was heavily medicated for pain, and indeed in the days before his death he was unresponsive to his caregivers and his daughters. I sang him his favorite Hawaiian song, and I thanked him for being my father; it’s nice to think he heard, but I know I did it mostly just for me.

The biggest surprise to me was that he looked somehow – beautiful. Skin and bones, but also the strange dignity of an entombed pharaoh. It was not difficult to watch him dying, and then to see him newly dead. Moments before the end, he moved his jaw up and down one last time, as if trying to speak. He wasn’t; the hospice nurse had told us this was likely to happen, an autonomic reaction to the end. And then he went, gently.

The best possible ending. And yet I can imagine Thomas’s speaker thinking – raging – is that it? Is that all he comes to, all we come to? He’s just going to slip away without another word, without acknowledging my presence, until he’s no longer present himself? A father – authoritative, powerful, at times scary – is giving up, fading away. A young man would hate that. Maybe everyone hates it at some level. To do otherwise is to admit our own helplessness.

Funny thing, I don’t think I’ve ever seen my father truly enraged. Mom, yeah, for sure – she was a very angry person a lot of the time. Dad was frustrated, discouraged, disgusted (the last few months of his life gave him plenty of current events for that), and sometimes angry, but his anger was never a blazing inferno like hers was. And yet when I think of his life, his whole life, it’s a long steady burn, not just a “blaze like meteors” at the end, as the poem says, with an after image that continues to shine.

https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night

 

 

 

 

Running to a hundred, interlude

 

Running in the woods one morning in autumn, the dog and I were surprised by a deer. She did not leap dramatically before us on the trail – she didn’t move at all, in fact, but we turned a corner and there she was, still and statuesque beneath the gold and crimson leaves, staring silently at us.

“Mom?” I blurted.

The deer did not reply, only continued to gaze. Parker and I gazed back, equally silent – the dog is wise enough to eschew going at anything so much larger than himself – and soon shuffled on.

I laughed. A small, wry laugh, ending in a sigh. I had been thinking about my mother at that moment, so despite the fact that she has never set foot in rural east-central Illinois, my response to the unexpected encounter wasn’t strange. Still, my mother would never be a deer. Something more fierce, more powerful.

“That you, Mom?” I called out the car window to the red-tailed hawk perched atop a utility pole a few days later. The hawk looked down at me in the imperious way raptors have. No, that wasn’t right either – despite their reputation, hawks spend most of the day sitting around conserving energy (as K no doubt would have told me). That wasn’t her; no, something more industrious, but not just that – something artistic as well, something that created beauty.

“Hey, Mom?” The next time it was a spider at the center of a stunning web tapestry strung across a window in our laundry room. By this point it had become a game, something along the lines of that children’s book Are You My Mother? only lighter on the whimsy and heavier on the melancholy.

I don’t believe in reincarnation. It’s a lovely idea, with just about as much truth as any other post-mortem scenario meant to console and comfort. But I know she’s none of those things. Nothing else is her; nothing ever will be her again.

*****

The team of 8^th graders I coached for cross country had a terrific season, a fact I’d dearly love to take credit for but in truth they did a lot more for me than I can possibly claim I did for them. Every XC meet saw me dashing madly from one point in the course to another, screaming and flailing my arms and jumping up and down and generally wearing myself out to satisfying exhaustion. I needed that release, badly. The pinnacle was sectionals: two girls and the entire boys team qualified for state, and the whole team easily beat every other school in exuberant joy.

It was the highlight of my admittedly short coaching career, and like everyone else I was ecstatic. I had a moment of thinking, “If Mom were still around I could have called and told her.” This was followed immediately with, “but I probably wouldn’t have.” She wouldn’t have understood what state, sectionals, or even cross country meant – “do they run across the whole country?” I could imagine her asking. It wouldn’t be that strange a question; after all, when I had been in high school I am sure I had no idea what cross country meant either – we lived in Hawaii, so how could you run across the country? Did you have to swim to Los Angeles first?

The irony is not lost on me that I ended up coaching a bunch of teen athletes given how little I did extracurricularly when I was their age. And I have to admit, when I entered the phase of grieving my mother that entailed anger at all the perceived unfinished business, however petty – and most of it was extremely petty – this thought came up. My mother was not the stereotypical Asian mom, driving us relentlessly to excel, to climb every mountain and join every club and otherwise pad our resumes for the Ivies. In the past she’d been told repeatedly that good American mothers were supportive and nurturing, “but not supposed to push kids. Push your kids, very bad,” she asserted. And she did not want to be a bad American mother. She urged my sister and me to do well in school, but since we generally were good if not exceptional students, she thought there was little else required. She didn’t know about things like cross country, the school newspaper, plays and concerts and clubs. If she’d ever heard the term “soccer mom,” she was likely clueless as to what it meant. Her own youth had been so drastically different from ours – a different country, culture, and language; hot water for only one hour a day and little more than rice for most meals; bombs and soldiers and war.

I knew all this, and yet I still used to wonder how it would have been if she’d done otherwise, if she had been more involved, if she had, if not pushed us, then at least been a little more aware of the things we could – probably should – have been doing. Coaching provided me some answers.

The kids were kids. No surprises there; they were all over the place and aggravating and hilarious and fun. The parents were – well, not really any surprises there either. At the first meet, one father kept insisting that his daughter wear her jacket over her singlet, even though it was a warm morning. “Look, everyone else is wearing theirs! You need to do it too!” I have no idea why this was such a crusade for him, maybe only because he needed to be able to give her some sort of command to obey.

Another father harangued his son – the star of the team, who would go on to finished second overall at state – for just about everything, even sitting the wrong way. “You are all hunched over! Stop that! Throw your shoulders back, open up your chest!” Did I mention that the kid finished second in the entire state? Father and son looked as morose as if he’d dropped out entirely. Second place out of hundreds, and the only thing running through both their minds was that it wasn’t first.

Not all the relationships were toxic, though. One young man who had been extra helpful to me that morning – putting up the tent, showing me where to get the bibs, running the drills with the team – brought his mother over after the meet. “This is the person you need to thank. She taught me how to be responsible.” I seriously thought I might start weeping. How freakin’ sweet is that? And really, even the haranguers were trying to show they cared, in their own way. Would any of these have been me and my mother? I couldn’t see it.

Perhaps the oddest interaction I had with XC parents involved the couple who sent me very long, very well-crafted emails about their daughter, who suffered performance anxiety to an extreme degree and, while she definitely wanted to be on the team, did not feel like she could race the first few meets. I shrugged; that was fine with me. This was followed several weeks later by more long, well-crafted emails suggesting that while it was good of me to allow their child to not race in the initial meets, now they were afraid she had lost all drive and might never race. I sighed; I’d talk to her.

She was adamant: she did not want to race. She would come to the meets, she would help with drills, she would assist me with coaching tasks, and she would run around with me screaming our heads off to cheer the runners on, but she would not race. I nodded; I could live with that.

The erudite couple could not, so the saga went on. They talked to her. The athletic director talked to her. They all asked me to talk to her again, because – shockingly – she did not seem like she wanted to talk to any of them about it anymore. I was done shrugging and nodding. “Hey,” I said to her first chance I got. “I know a lot of people are pushing you to race. Well, I’m not going to be one of them. You’ve been extremely supportive and active in the team, and as far as I’m concerned, you’re fine.”

She smiled her thanks. She didn’t race the next meet but stood with me ringing cowbells and yelling our throats ragged as our runners went by.

Was I wrong? Should I have pushed her to race? Was she missing out on a crucial opportunity? But look: maybe that opportunity comes back, like it did for me. You don’t need to be pushed. It’s in you already to find it and take it. Maybe my mother knew that too.

*****

Three hours after the state meet finished, K and I got on a plane to the PNW to watch my mother’s ashes be interred. My father is ex-military and has a section in a memorial wall at the Tahoma National Cemetery for himself and his wife. None of us thought she would be the first one put there.

It was an odd ceremony. The urn and a photo of mom (elegant and serene in a burgundy jacket and a matching scarf I knitted for her for Christmas) went into the designated hole in the wall. We looked up at the hole, whispered our good-byes. Rain fell in torrents; the umbrella I tried to hold over my dad in his wheelchair probably did more harm than good as cascades drenched his legs. After a moment of silence, a man put up a metal plaque over the hole and took an electric drill to secure each corner. The whirring of a DeWalt cordless is not quite the appropriately solemn sound one expects at such a moment, but I still bawled buckets, even though it was impossible to think of my mother as being here forever.

She wasn’t here forever. No one is. I know she’s gone; she’s not in a forest or above a cornfield or in the window of our house; she’s not even part of a wall of ex-soldiers, far too many of them. I can’t end this essay with a sense of consolation I don’t feel. But I also can’t end it with despair, because that’s something else she wouldn’t have understood. She was not a sad person. She was – she is, at least a little, a part of me, as people kindly remind me when I’m feeling particularly forlorn about my loss, and as I’ve seen myself, in the unlikeliest of times and places.

 

Running to a Hundred, part 3

The audiobook I chose to listen to late in my quest for a 100-mile ultra was Jane Austen’s Persuasion. It’s fun to imagine the withering smile and polite disdain Ms. Austen might give in response to this statement, were she able to understand it – and, in truth, most people in this century would fail to understand it. An ultra runner and sometime-novelist herself might think this the ultimate compliment – Yours is the work I chose to experience whilst enduring these long hours of suffering – but nobody else would.

I had decided on the Austen novel because I wanted something light and fun, and because about 90% of what I listen to while running long distances is, in fact, 19th century literature, which can’t be all that unusual a thing to do, surely. I needed it to be something I’d read before, so I’d know for sure I’d enjoy it, something with beautifully wrought sentences that entranced and enthralled, but also with intelligence and humor and a happy ending. It’s not the least bit spoilery to note that every Austen novel ends with the heroine marrying a great man whose love and admiration for her is equal to hers for him. We all know the script, so we know this ending comes only after a whole lot of struggle (over tea) and conflict (plus dancing), and more than once the heroine resigns herself to never seeing her true love again, usually at the very moment she realizes he is, in fact, her true love. There’s also a lot of hypocrisy, snobbery, passive aggressive manipulation, and considerable discussion of people’s countenances. They didn’t have social media back then so they had to scroll through faces the old-fashioned way. 

But in Persuasion, Austen’s last completed novel before her death, the shadow of being too late, of missing your one chance at happiness, looms large, both in the book and, possibly, in reality. Its heroine is pushing 30, its author’s health in decline. Anne Elliot is described as having once been a beauty but now, lacking the bloom of youth, haggard. She had once been deeply in love and engaged to marry, but (cue title) had been persuaded to break the engagement by family and friends who considered the gentleman unsuitable, meaning neither titled nor rich. Tantalizingly, the few bits of Austen’s correspondence that survived (her protective sister Cassandra destroyed almost all of it after Jane’s death) suggest that Jane herself had once (maybe?) found someone as wonderful as Frederick Wentworth and (perhaps?) had wanted to marry him. Unlike Anne, however, Jane didn’t marry him. She never married anyone.

We can tell ourselves this might have been by choice. Austen’s books were hugely popular even in her own time; with such success, acclaim, and adulation, did she even need a husband? It’s a ridiculous question – human needs are varied and complex – yet it’s just too heartbreaking to believe the woman who penned six of the most popular love stories ever had missed the chance at her own happily-ever-after. Nothing aches like opportunity lost.

These were probably not the most helpful thoughts I could’ve had while trudging through the wee hours of the night, feet bubbling with blisters, pain like riptide pulling me under. I had known the nighttime part of the run would be tough, but I hadn’t expected my brain to spiral down panicky thoughts of Is it too late? Am I too late? I’m not going to make it, am I. But the idea of Austen writing a book in which love comes almost too late haunted me. She had to know there was no almost left for her.

Friends who had done very long races before had told me the sun coming up in the morning after an all-night run is the most glorious thing ever. It was, but not in the way I thought it would be. As soon as it got light, I knew with absolute clarity that I was not going to complete the hundred. At about 23 and a half hours, I’d gone 80.6 miles, and I was done. 

What regrets can you live with? Truthfully, all of them. Even the worst choices can be rationalized away, smothered under a blanket of denial. But regrets are another variation on the oft-memed Shroedinger’s cat: you can both wish things had happened differently and yet know they couldn’t have. I wanted so badly to keep moving. I wanted so desperately to stop. I stopped, and I’m OK with that, even though I still wish I were stronger, tougher, that things had worked out better. There is absolutely no connection between ultramarathons and Jane Austen, but I do hope Austen was OK, too, with whatever that she had in her mysterious, complex, too-brief life. 

Running to a Hundred, Part 2

 

K and I are going out to the Pacific Northwest next week for a brief trip to see my family, celebrate K’s birthday (it’s a big one), and visit North Cascades National Park. North Cascades was the second least-visited National Park in the U.S. last year, a fact as surprising as it is delightful. I suppose after people have done Olympic and Rainier, they figure they’ve seen the essential PNW and stop there. Fine with me; it’s August and everyone is in summer desperation mode. Miles-long standstill traffic at a bear-sighting in Yellowstone or scores-deep crowds between you and the South Rim – hard pass. Hit ‘em where they ain’t.

There’s also a race I’m doing out there, by the way, which I’ll get to later in this post. For now, I’ll leave it at that, which is all I told my family about it. They don’t understand my running obsession, so I’ve stopped giving details. Can anyone really understand someone else’s obsession if they don’t share it? What’s more, when my mother’s in the picture, I’ve pretty much stopped talking about my life at all. There’s not much point. Presented with new information, she gets confused, she doesn’t understand, and she quickly forgets. Lately this happens even presented with old information – my name, her name, her marital status, the past 40 years of her life.

Mom’s thoughts run in circles these days. She asks a question, my father or sister or I answer, and then, because the topic is still in her mind, a few minutes later she’ll ask the same thing. And yet, as is common, she remembers with absolute clarity things that happened in her childhood, over 80 years ago, during a war nearly everyone else alive only knows about from history books. As well, she remembers – has never forgotten – music. Mom likes to say that she learned English listening to old musicals. Like a multilingual Eliza Doolittle, she’ll suddenly break into “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain!” (and will sing it, of course, again). That’s one of her favorites these days, though her top favorite right now doesn’t come from a musical but rather a Hitchcock film. It’s “Qué será, será,” the song Doris Day belted out in The Man Who Knew Too Much. My mother adored Doris Day; in my childhood Mom thought she was consoling me for my less-than-flawless complexion by saying, “Doris Day has freckles too!” It did not console. Doris Day was no Barbie.

*****

When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother, what will I be?
Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?
Here's what she said to me…

*****

“So how long have you been running?”

I mathed it out. “About 15 years.”

Compared to many of my running friends, that’s not exceptional, but it’s a lifetime to the person who asked, as her dropped jaw and wide eyes attested. She hadn’t yet been breathing air for 15 years.

A position had opened up for coaching the younger runners on the cross-country team where I teach high school, and I figured why not. That is, other than the fact that I have zero actual cross-country experience, either running it as a student or coaching it as an adult. The other coaches, my husband, and all my running friends assured me that didn’t matter. I know running, and I know motivation. What more was there?

That said, running is different when you’re 54 and not 14, not that anyone there would know it. In a baseball hat and sunglasses hiding silver streaks and crow’s feet, I likely don’t look my age to the casual observer, and even after I tell the inquisitive young athlete I wasn’t a runner in high school, it would still probably surprise her to know the 15-year clock didn’t start until I was in my late 30s. If she’s impressed by my 15-year career, she’d be stunned stupid to find out I’m close to her grandma’s age.

But right now that doesn’t matter. I’m doing a five-mile trail run with her and a few others on a balmy Saturday morning and she’s asking me everything I know about the sport. This group is mostly the back-of-the-packers, newer to running and visibly intimidated by the varsity group, tall and statuesque and so very assured about everything they do.

I turn them away from such comparisons and instead wax heartfelt and rapturous about the joys of running. “Plus,” I add for the benefit of encouraging a healthy competitive spirit, “Running is full of surprises. The person you would never pick out as being fast – a lot of times that person is an absolute beast out there. It’s a funny thing about runners: they often look quite ordinary.”

“Yes! That’s true! In fact, umm …” my youthful protege hesitated, glancing at me, “I don’t mean this as disrespect, but that’s what I thought about you when I first saw you. I had no idea you were running a hundred miles!”

I laughed. I didn’t take it as disrespect at all. For 53 years of my life, I had no idea myself. Fought very hard against it, in fact, the way runners do when a crazy idea gets hold of them. After a 5K, twice that is impossible. After 10K, a half marathon can’t happen. After a half, no way am I doing a full. After a full, no way will I do another. After several, ultras are out of the question. After 50K, 50 miles, 100K, nope, nope, nope, that’s it, no more, the end. And so here we are again, less than two weeks away from something I never even thought was a thing, much less a thing I’d do.

*****

When I grew up and fell in love
I asked my sweetheart, what lies ahead?
Will we have rainbows day after day?
Here’s what my sweetheart said…

*****

During the taper – often about two weeks before a race – a lot of things happen in the runner’s brain to make up for the lack of megamiles. You think you’re injured. You think you’re coming down with something. Everything you eat is making you bloaty and flabby, and you question every aspect of your training plan. Only in this case, I was RIGHT to question my training, because I felt really, really good. How can that BE? I’m TRAINING to run A HUNDRED MILES. You don’t feel GOOD doing that, and if you do, you’re doing it very, very WRONG.

K disagreed. He thought I’d done quite well prepping physically; the question was whether I was sufficiently prepared mentally. This is something he’s always observed about me, and for good reason: he’s right. My brain gives me much more trouble than my legs, and running, as I blithely tell the XC athletes, is very much mental. Also do as I say, not as I do.

There’s an added mental-fortitude aspect to this particular race I’m doing, in that it’s not actually 100 miles but rather 32 hours. Participants have that amount of time to run as many 2.6-mile loops around a lake in the mountains as they can. Many of the runners are aiming for their first hundred, as it’s a relatively easy course and the short loops mean aid is readily available.

Even other nutty ultra runners often disdain fixed-time loop races, for the same reason non-runners do: it sounds excruciatingly boring. And yet, I argue, there is a comfort to familiarity that makes doing something this insane a little more feasible, at least to me and like-minded lunatics. Plus, realistically, what is there to see on any trail, loop or otherwise, in the middle of the night, when the mind is most likely to shut down?

“The problem,” said a friend of mine with several hundreds under her belt, “is there’s the temptation to stop whenever you finish a loop. If you’re 50 miles from the start on an out-and-back course, you might as well keep going because you don’t have much choice.”

My mind, however, doesn’t work like that. I’m more likely to stop if the road ahead is long and daunting and I have far to go before I can rest. If I know I can rest in just a few short miles, I know I can do that again, over and over. At least, I think I can do that. At least, sometimes I think that. Oh hell.

*****

Now I have children of my own
They ask their mother, what will I be?
Will I be handsome? Will I be rich?
I tell them tenderly…

*****

During our run that Saturday, one of the varsity runners passed my group, grimacing with the heat and his efforts but still smiling as we cheered him on. “How’s it going?” I called to him.

He groaned. “I feel like death.”

“Well, you know, if you don’t feel like death, you aren’t pushing hard enough!”

The kid beamed at me, pleased: it feels good to know that your suffering is a testament to your strength and perseverance. Funny thing is I’m not sure I always believe that myself. Frequently I observe that suffering is mostly just a whole lot of pain and misery. It isn’t noble, it doesn’t build character, it doesn’t go towards a greater purpose. When my mother plunges from jaunty renditions of showtunes into an abyss of darkness and rage, what lesson can I learn from it? What inspiration can I draw?

But I don’t think about that now. We’re running now. We’re breathing and moving and our hearts are beating and even though we end up where we’ve started, like a song that comes back to its chorus, there’s joy in the return.

“This is so different from cross country in my middle school!” the inquisitive girl exclaimed. “The coach was awful. She made us run laps around the track all the time. That’s the only thing we did. And if we stopped to walk, she kicked us out of practice for the rest of the day.”

I was justly appalled. “That’s horrible! Running should not feel like punishment!” And with respect to Danny Rojas and Ted Lasso, I added, “Running is life!”

Perhaps that was laying it on too thick, but it did go over well. Smiles all around, and a shyly added, “I hope I can be like you and run as an adult. I wonder if I’ll be able to do that.”

I didn’t break out into song, no matter how tempted I might have been. “It’s possible,” I said. “I’m hoping the experience you have now will help make it possible.”

Which is not quite the same thing as “Qué será, será,” but funny thing about that famous song: the title is meaningless. It’s a mistranslation. Grammatically, it doesn’t work; musically, who cares – it’s catchy and singable, and apparently very memorable.

Qué será, será
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours to see
Qué será, será
What will be, will be

 

Running to a hundred, part 1

  

A few days ago, my mother asked my sister who that person was in the kitchen. “Is it my mother?” Mom asked.

“It’s your husband.”

“I’m married?” Yes. “How long have I been married?” Fifty-eight years. “What’s his name?” “Is he living here?” “Are you sure that isn’t my mother?” And, “Does he sometimes wear dresses?”, which would have been hilarious in another context. But we’re dealing with this context, the one in which the face my mother should probably know even better than her own was now that of a stranger.

Imagining her own mother come back to life might have at least a little sweetness if not for the fact that my mother has never had anything particularly sweet to say about her. She’s never outright dissed Grandma, but my fleeting glimpses into her past haven’t suggested much to be sentimental about.  The most positive takeaway I’ve gotten was that, for an early-20^th-century Chinese woman, she was at 5’6 considered tall, as well as athletic, the star of the girls’ basketball and volleyball teams in her school. I’ve joked with my mother that maybe that’s where I got my own (admittedly modest and much-later-in-life) athleticism. But then I’m only 5’4, can’t sink a free throw to save my life, and when volleyballs come at me my instinct is to duck.

Nor is there much sentimentality to my parents’ nearly six-decade marriage. At their 50^th anniversary party, my mother told all the guests that she and Dad met at a party where she’d had champagne for the first time in her life, gotten tipsy, and went home with him. It wasn’t a story I’d heard before; who knows if that’s what actually happened, but as stories go it at least has some crude charm, certainly compared to the time she told an almost complete stranger that she only married my father to get her Green Card. Entirely charmless has been much of her behavior to him as the tide of dementia pulls her under. We’ve held regular family Zoom calls that have been mostly pleasant and free of rancor, but even reduced to a small rectangle on a small screen, my mother’s look of loathing and rage whenever my father speaks is impossible to miss.

This probably hasn’t been fun to read so far. It most assuredly was not fun to write. No wonder I do so much running these days. No one can escape for long the reality of the mind’s limitations and the body’s frailty, and sometimes running only emphasizes these things all the more. But it’s a reality I chose, and continue to choose, because as vulnerable as I feel when my body is trashed and my brain is wailing I can’t I can’t I can’t, I also feel more alive, and more myself, than at any other time and place, in that moment.

*****

People seem awfully enamored with the possibilities of artificial intelligence right now. I could adopt cranky teacher persona and grouse that maybe they should focus on real intelligence once in a while, but I won’t. AI does interest me, though it doesn’t astound me all that much, even in terms of its capabilities with language. It strikes me as pretty straightforward: if you could access everything that has ever been written, along with when and by whom and for what purpose, why wouldn’t you be able to write a solid five-paragraph essay for a high school English class, if not something even more sophisticated? Granted, so far as I am aware, AI poetry is pretty awful, but then so is a lot of human-crafted poetry. Regardless, the output of AI is not really of concern to me, not even as a high school English teacher who could potentially see a lot of ChatGPT coming her way. I rather doubt this will happen, in fact, because the point of a lot of my assignments is for each student to craft something only one person in the world could write. Nobody else is you. Write you.

But is this true? Is each person’s writing truly unique to them? I have no doubt that AI could craft a “personal” essay about, say, dealing with a parent with dementia, and that it might even be moving to many readers. On some level, AI merely does what people do when they write. Nobody is born knowing any language; we have to learn all of it, and we learn the written part of it by synthesizing what’s already been written. Sound familiar?

But even if it could write a blog post much like this one, one thing is impossible for AI: it cannot reflect a personal experience. It doesn’t have any. Personal experiences are messy, confusing, frustrating, and sometimes terrifying – and for the same reason that makes them wonderful. They are unique to the person going through them. We can’t ever know what it’s like to be someone else.

*****

There’s a passage in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar where Esther is in a hospital and sees a woman who has been given the drug scopolamine before giving birth. The drug doesn’t suppress pain at the moment pain occurs but rather suppresses the memory of the pain; it had actually been used during WWII in the torture of spies for information. Esther is justly appalled: the woman still has to suffer but has no defense against such suffering happening again – which, perhaps, was the whole point. I think about this scene, oddly, when I think about what my mother is going through. Probably the most brutal thing, one of many, about dementia is that its sufferers realize something’s wrong without being able to understand what it is.

My sister and I have gotten used to her asking us what our names are, and even the thing about my father being her mother (paging Dr. Freud?) was just a more detailed facet of memory loss. Still, it came as a shock when she began asking what her own name was. This was the moment when she herself started to sense that things weren’t right. The sensation of not recognizing someone else is commonplace – most people in the world are unfamiliar to us, after all, so not knowing your own children or husband by itself wouldn’t necessarily be jarring. Not knowing your own self, who and where and when you are – well, alienating wouldn’t even begin to describe it. The things that make her who she is – her memories, her very identity – have gone a fogged grey, a Polaroid in reverse.  

This is hard to write. Sometimes I envy AI.

When she talks to me, my mother always brings up one thing: Goldman Sachs. That’s right, the investment bank, where I used to work many years and a few lifetimes ago. She brings this up because how I got the job at Goldman Sachs was I decided I wanted to live in New York and be a writer, because I was ambitious and creative, but I also wanted a job, because I was practical and needed health insurance, so I called up my mother and asked if she wanted to visit the Big Apple with me while I went on interviews.

“Goldman Sachs! Do you remember?”

“Yeah, Mom. I worked there. We took a trip together to Manhattan.”

“You remember that restaurant we went to?”

“The Oyster Bar! In Grand Central Station.”

“Yes! That was a good place.”

“Yes it was. We liked it so much we went there twice. That was a good trip.”

It’s a happy memory for her, clearly, and even though she’ll often bring it up two or three times in a single short phone call, I’m always willing to go through the same dialogue again and again. Her voice rings with joy when she talks about it, and given the number of far less joyous things she could remember between us, I’m more than happy to have this be the one she comes back to, so that she can be herself in that moment again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Running that risk

I’ve been running, and blogging about it, for long enough that I feel emboldened to make the following observation with complete confidence: Running has not made me a better person.

It hasn’t made me a worse person, mind you. I haven’t gone on crime sprees to pay reg fees for races. Yet all those qualities that obsessive runners ascribe to one another – tough, strong, determined, badass – I wouldn’t say I now have in any more abundance than before I became a runner or than anyone I know who doesn’t run. That I have the fortitude to keep moving for many hours in a row has not, I fully recognize, transcended to other aspects of my life. I am not any more likely now to rescue orphans from burning buildings than I was 20 years ago, unless those orphans are 50 miles away and no one else could get to them and their building was made from some extremely slow-burning material such that I could make it there in time (while taking brief but regular stops to hydrate and fuel).

Daily I see social media posts assuring their readers that we are stronger than we think, that failure is not an option, that we are enough and that we can do anything we want if we just try our best. I know those who post them mean well, and I know some people find comfort and inspiration in them. I don’t reject them out of dark-hearted perversity but rather from personal experience. A 54-year-old woman cannot do anything she wants; no one can, and to say otherwise is a slap in the face to anyone who has ever wanted something desperately and didn’t get it. I’m not always strong, not always enough, and as for failure, well, if anything, I’ve experienced even more of that as a runner than ever before. I’ve DNF’d. I’ve DNS’d. I’ve bawled and cursed and thrown tantrums because a race didn’t go the way I wanted, and that has happened more times than I’ve soared triumphant across finish lines radiating victory from every sweaty pore.

And let me tell you, that’s one of the best things about it.

In between long runs, I teach at a high school whose official name includes the word “laboratory” (though no one ever uses that name) because a big part of the school’s mission is experimentation. Teachers are encouraged to try new, innovative methods of teaching; students are encouraged to be more than just test-takers but also risk-takers; the hallways are a raucous jumble of noise and color rather than the beige-and-right-angles of a staid institution. Of course, mission statements are lovely but rarely borne out on an everyday basis; every challenge to time-honored pedagogy is guaranteed to meet with resistance, and while it’s pleasing to imagine one’s self a risk-taker, there’s no grade for that on one’s report card and would the Ivies really pick a 2.0 risk-taker over a 4.0 with a perfect SAT?

That’s what’s so insidious about experimentation: you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. And it’s one thing to experiment with a new hair color or a cuisine you’ve never tried before; it’s another to pour one unknown after another into the Erlenmeyer flask of the soul and hope you don’t explode. That, however, is precisely why I’ve come to see running as an experiment rather than a proof. I don’t “prove” anything in running, not to anyone else and not even to myself. Good scientists know that if you go into an experiment aiming to prove something, you probably will, because bad science can support anything you want. A true experiment doesn’t rationalize the outcome. What’s more, an experiment takes place in a controlled environment, so its consequences are limited. If I fail at running, no one is affected but me, and I’ll get over it. Whether I’m a bad person or a weak person or a thoroughly mediocre person is irrelevant. I tried something to see what it would be like. Since I keep trying it, what it must be like at least some of the time is enjoyable. What it is the rest of the time is nothing less than feeling very much alive.  

My wish for my students of the class of 2023 is that they can find some way to live their lives as an experiment – that they do something with the ultimate goal of caring less about the ultimate goal than the experience along the way. Don’t envision what you’re going to say about it on social media. Maybe don’t even post about it at all. (Trust me, it does still happen.) And don’t make your self-worth hinge on it one way or another. Are you an amazing person because you did the thing, or a worthless loser because you didn’t? Who cares – what do you want to try next?

 

 

Six words and many miles later

My creative writing students are crafting sestinas this week, and in the spirit of fairness I’m writing one too. I don’t always write poetry, but when I do I take six unrelated words and shove them into a ridiculously rigid form. As I tell my class, nothing will give you writer’s block faster than realizing you can write whatever you want. Give yourself parameters in your chosen endeavor, though – craft a self-portrait in triangles or hike every trail that leads to a waterfall or cook a month’s worth of meals with eggplant as the main ingredient – and instantly become tsunami’d with creative juices.

Here’s my sestina, crafted from words randomly suggested by the class. Unsurprisingly, it ended up being about running.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_I62hY6Y2Pkl3rHDPwaY3ghlF630PxAl4J2rWjfxBVo/edit?usp=sharing

I think what I like about the sestina as a form is that it’s both arbitrary and orderly at once. A lot of my favorite things are like this, including running. The marathon distance of 26.2 miles does not have profoundly meaningful origins (and no, the first marathon runner didn’t die after completing it, because he didn’t actually complete that particular distance). It may seem ridiculous to focus so much time and energy, so much blood (occasionally, when I trip and fall), sweat (buckets), and tears (more than I like to admit) on such randomness. It is ridiculous. A glorious ridiculous, providing a much-needed break from the serious and mundane. 

A good friend and fellow runner recently ran two marathons on successive weekends. The first was supposed to be her serious marathon, the second just for funsies, and if that seems preposterous to you, well, let’s just say the running crowd either wouldn’t agree or else would and add that preposterous is the very point. As it turned out, the weather was crap for the first marathon, unseasonably warm and brutally windy, and everyone suffered, both in spirit and in finishing time. My friend shrugged it off, ran the funsies marathon as intended, and got a personal best time. Many who congratulated her encouraged her to take this as a lesson in having a more relaxed attitude toward running, focusing on the enjoyment rather than obsessing over the goals. Like most advice, it is sensible and sound and will absolutely not be followed because when have people ever followed sensible, sound advice if they weren’t already doing it?

Personally I have mixed feelings about that advice. Sure, running is a hobby and hobbies should be enjoyable. But we wouldn’t pursue hobbies if we didn’t have some sort of goal in mind, even if that goal is simply to pass the time doing something we enjoy. And the truth is the more time you do something, the better you get at it, and doing things well adds to enjoyment. Obviously you can take any aspect of this to extremes; what I wonder is why enjoyment vs. goal need be a “vs.” at all. 

Increasingly I find myself questioning the unnecessary dichotomy between things we do for fun and things we do for a purpose. There’s this pervasive mentality that we have to work to earn our fun, to earn our anything. Ask a runner why they run (but actually don’t, because then they’ll tell you and you’ll never get away), and chances are pretty good that they’ll say something about proving to themselves they can do hard things. But do you really have to do that? Of course not, not any more than I had to write a poem about a possum. But just as the sestina makes you write something you’d otherwise never have done, the arbitrary goal you set for yourself in other realms gives you an experience you’d otherwise have missed. I haven’t “proven” that I’m a poet. I’ve written a poem. I kind of like it.

Now, you can live quite a wonderful life never having written a poem or run a Boston-qualifying marathon or cooked 31 different eggplant dishes in a row. Having tried and failed at those things doesn’t invalidate your existence any more than trying and succeeding makes you a superior specimen of humanity. In running as in many other pursuits, there’s a strong “you have to want it bad enough” mentality. But what if you decide midway that you don’t really want it all that bad? Being a runner in what is most certainly the second half of your life, I’ve found, means accepting that some goals may always be out of reach, partly because they stop mattering so much. Once I thought I’d never rest until I got that BQ. Now I’m not so sure. The need for a goal to be more about enjoyment and less about validation and achievement has started to take over, and I’m starting to find myself letting go of dreams I once clutched like a life preserver. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Letting go can be calming. It can protect you from being disappointed, even while it engenders its own disappointment like a long, resigned sigh.

I will not be a household name in any realm of writing, certainly not in poetry (this is maybe the fourth poem I’ve ever liked enough to share publicly), nor in novels, which had been my dream ever since I began typing stories on the $3 garage-sale manual typewriter I had as a kid. And I may never run another marathon. That is to say, I may never run 26.2 miles and stop. The arbitrary goal I’ve set my sights on next is a hundred. It’s still random – measuring by miles is distinctly old-fashioned, abandoned by nearly everyone in the world who didn’t chicken out at the thought of learning the metric system and hid their fear under a pose of belligerent swagger – and that’s just fine. It’ll be an interesting experience one way or another.  

I've seen worse

Nemesis was the ancient Greek goddess who punished mortals for hubris–arrogance against the gods. Her name derives from the ancient Greek word for retribution. Today we use the term synonymously with “enemy,” but its origins are so much deeper and more interesting. An enemy could be a rival, a bully, or an evil monologuing villain–regardless, it’s an external threat. A nemesis doesn’t threaten you but rather reacts to you. And given that the original Nemesis enacted retribution, maybe in this case you are the evil monologuing villain.

Or just stupid. Case in point, me. Only a month into marathon training I’ve injured myself, and it’s my own fault, my own hubris that made me think those little twinges in my foot could be brushed aside while I pursued running glory. I won’t pretend it isn’t disappointing, but I’ve been here before and I know what to do–and, as a mature (but still stupid) runner, I’m completely willing to do it. It’s a setback to my goal, and once I’m back in action I may end up running out of time before the race. So be it. 

It’s my Achilles tendon, and just like that we’re back to Greek mythology, Achilles of course being the great Greek warrior who fought against the Trojans. It’s a little sad that he’s most famous for his vulnerability, kind of like the way the name Scrooge is used to refer to a joyless miser even though the whole point of him was his transformation to a joyful giver. Likewise, badass Achilles single-handedly turned the war in the Greeks’ favor with his fighting prowess, but what does he get for his pains? His name is a metaphor for weak spot. To add further insult to injury (ha ha, see what I did there?), the story involving Achilles’s own heel was apparently a much later addition to his mythology. Homer’s Iliad ends with Achilles still very much alive and victorious, with no mention anywhere of his mother’s protective action of dunking her son in the River Styx to make him invincible. Almost. 

I confess I had not read the Iliad until this summer. It was the first book I picked up once the school year ended, because that’s the kind of beach book I go for. I enjoyed the read, way more than I would have if I’d been assigned it 30 years ago in a classroom. It’s incredibly violent and gruesome, which isn’t surprising given that it’s a war story; more surprising to me was the part Achilles played. He appears front and center in Chapter 1 line 1, mad as Hades. Why is he so enraged? Not because of the enemy. He’s pissed off at Agamemnon, a fellow Greek–someone on his own side–because Agamemnon insulted him. Achilles proceeds to sulk angrily for several chapters offstage; meanwhile the brutality of the war is relentless. Achilles could end it if he resumed fighting, but he refuses until his best friend is killed by Trojan hero Hector. Then he really gets mad.

This is an extremely condensed version of only a small, if significant, part of the story, but I was struck by how petty these supposedly valiant warriors could be. Nyah nyah nyah, Achilles, I’m taking your woman. Wah, wah, Agamemnon dishonored me. And the gods are just as petty, if not worse (definitely worse–pettiness and power are a disastrous combination, as we in this country well know). The Trojan War happened in the first place because the goddess Eris didn’t get invited to a party. That’s right, a lot of people got disemboweled because of someone else’s FOMO.

You can only indulge in pettiness if you can afford it; people often add the expression “first-world problems” to their complaints with a sheepish grin to show they know this. It is, in a sense, arrogant to be petty, to take the tiniest setback as a deep personal affront. I’m trying not to do this right now, as I wheel around the house in my rolling office chair, sighing heavily when I get to the stairs. This was my own doing, and nobody’s going to be eviscerated because of it; nobody’s going to suffer at all but me, and I’ll be fine. Sure, there’s been some angry sulking, but at a mere mortal’s level. Nemesis, you win the battle again, but hopefully it’s only in the interest of helping me win the war.