Marathons and Sprints

After several days of warmth and spring hope it is back to the cold gray of late February. I'd actually forgotten spring was coming; I'd gotten so involved in the woodstove and books and hibernating that to come outside and see the optimistic sprigs of daffodils was a literal surprise. This reversion to the cold was expected and yet still manages to be a letdown.

Lately I've been thinking about running. Unemployment is a marathon and not a sprint and I've realized that this is true with most things. We are running marathons. Nothing is a sprint except an actual sprint.

And yet, I think in terms of sprints. I think short-term, I think here and now and do little to consider the future. I do it with relationships, friendships, finances and more; whatever feels good now is what I'll do. I distill my world to 140 character status updates, and do not consider the punctuation marks I use may not be correct. The place I put a period may be where God wanted a semicolon, changing what I thought was an end into merely a pause. I don't look far enough ahead to understand the difference.

The question I struggle with is how am I to learn to live a marathon life in a world that thinks in sprints?

I want to train to pace myself, to work up to the hills and stretch the parts of me that get overworked along the way. I want to understand that the blisters I get are not because I'm a terrible person or a failure, but because I am a person who is running and blisters happen to runners. In the marathon world, I must pay close attention to what I take in and where I'm going. If I'm to run the race marked out for me, training for the long-distance and not the immediate future is the difference between standing at the finish line and giving up before I can see it.

Valentines

Love doesn't look the way we planned it.

I Know the Meaning of Every Word

Preface: This is totally dumb but it was fun to make up. Call it a strange writing exercise. I decided I'd take words, break them down into other words then base the definition of the original word on that. So now I can know the meaning of every word, even as they are entirely wrong. Happy weekend.

Original word: Determination.
Deter: to discourage or refrain from acting
Min: little
at: preposition, used to indicate a location
ion: type of a molecule with unequal number of electrons and protons

Thus Determination means: “the small discouragement expressed toward charged particles.”
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Original word: Lifeline.
Li: Ancient Chinese word for ritual
Feline: Cat

Thus Lifeline means “the cat ritual”
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Original word: Turban.
Tur: type of pea or bean
ban: to not allow, to restrict access to

Thus Turban means “disallow access to a pea”
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Original word: Destiny.
Des: code for diethylstilboestrol, a synthetic estrogen known to cause vaginal tumors
Tiny: small, minute
Thus Destiny means “Small synthetic estrogen samples”
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Original word: Fundamental.
Fun: joyous, enjoyable
Da: slang, meaning yes in German
Men: adult male of the human species
tal: rain or dew

Thus Fundamental means: “Joyous males say yes to rain”
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Original word: Incumbent.
In: within or contained by something
Cum: male sexual discharge
Bent: crooked, not straight

Thus Incumbent means “Male discharge contained crookedly”or by its common name, penis.
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Ok, that was fun to make up. Stop rolling your eyes at me. I work from home now, remember? I have a lot of time to just sit around.

Pinata

In the future, remind me that drinking half a bottle of strong wine with one friend, then going to a Super Bowl party with other friends & drinking beer there, and not eating is a very, very bad combo.
Here is a favorite video clip as of late. Cracked up laughing.

Day One

Here dies the first day of this grand adventure. For as much as I've done that may seem crazy to an outsider, up to this point the moves I've made and risks I've taken have been quite measured. I double and triple check safety gear, I do not quit a job until another is secure. My ducks are kept firmly ensconced in the row in which I've placed them. I am not reckless. Today starts a shift away from those habits, and my ducks are clumped, frightened and facing every which way.
This morning I awoke, made coffee, showered and dressed for work as I have done for the past two years (though I gave myself an extra half-hour of sleep). I made an office space for myself and a schedule, written in sharpie like it was the word of God. My hands rested on the keyboard in the way I learned to hold them back in typing class. I breathed, said a prayer, and began the day.

It was a full and productive. I am brimming with ideas, most of which will prove to go nowhere. I've had encouragement from unlikely sources. I am 90% sure this is the move I'm to be making. I have no evidence to support this theory.

My mind keeps going back to planting. At my old job, we worked with restoring old mined sites. These sites were certified cleared of mining influence, but were old areas where the soil had been so compacted that only scrub plants could grow; nothing long-term or healthy could survive with soil that hard and compressed. Roots couldn't penetrate the unnatural hardpan. My former company would go in and rip up the scrub plants. They would till the hardened soil over and over again, breaking up the clumps and once again adding air to the earth. And only when the soil was loosened was it ready to be planted with the seeds of the long-term, the seeds that would take it from scrub land to healthy forest, that place it was supposed to be all along. There was destruction in the process of construction, something I'm realizing is almost universally true.
I can say that on day one.