Today I woke up late, having stayed up too late and also having been ambitious exercising the day before.
I’ve been running again, not as consistently as I’d like but more is more. I got up to about a 5k in very few sessions and also I have been so slow! I remember ten to fifteen years ago I was running this distance fifteen to twenty minutes faster, but I’m fatter now and generally less fit - I used to lift, walk more, rock climb. So this time I decided I’d go faster briefly. At each quarter mile marker I’d run faster for a little bit, basically, on the theory that as long as it felt okay doing this regularly would be, I dunno, beneficial. So then I got done and my time was five minutes shorter! I’m still going wicked slow, but less so, so that’s cool. I don’t remember anything else about yesterday. Oh it wasn’t a good work day, over all this wasn’t a good work week, worn out and whatnot, vaccine reaction and so on.World events are a nightmare today, a weird juxtaposition to what a lovely day I had with my kid (more on that in a moment). Another friend who follows the world and is coming from a similar place said they had read enough to be informed and then decided to go do something else as reading further had begun to feel like mental self-harm. I related to that.
Today I remembered “In A Big Country” exists and listened to it several times. I have no idea what the line about how a lover’s voice “fires the mountainside” means - okay, I have SOME idea, just not a clear one - but even so it’s great, great song. Every aspect of it, just perfect. I made lunch for the kids - toast, we finished the last of the bread, must go shopping. (This is high quality writing here, eh?!)
The dryer needed cleaning out, vacuuming out the lint. My wife did the front end, then I moved the washing machine and climbed in back with a screwdriver to take the vent off, vacuumed out some more of it. This is adult life, I guess? I’m a big guy and it’s a confined space, I was lying on my side with a screwdriver and the vacuum cleaner hose got a little kinked so it made this really high pitched shrieking sound, not a good time! It’s sort of like running, in a way: gotta do this unpleasant task of vacuuming out the lint in order to maintain capacity for doing an unpleasant task - i.e., laundry - in the future. Running’s similar: it sucks, and the reward is dying later, which, given that I’m running again, means more total time running, which sucks. ‘Happy birthday, I got you some undercooked sprouts!’
I actually like running (and sprouts! though not at the same time, gotta be one or the other. Walk and chew gum and I do, run and eat sprouts, that's too much for me). My running sport is by the river. There’s trees and birds and sometimes deer, and the water’s pretty too. I also like the running headspace. The kinds of things my mind is too full of gradually empty out while I run. I should get my music player thing sorted out and find my headphones, I could listen to music while I run and probly empty my head even further. I’m hoping to run again tomorrow, we’ll see.
The other bit today, the best bit, and it was truly excellent, is that I took my oldest kid to a performance she wanted to go to, live show the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. I didn’t love the indoor public space and lots of masklessness, being a covid zero zealot and all, but she wanted to go and I wanted to do something nice for her. Fingers crossed the recent vaccine shot and n95 mask wards off the bug. But the show was great, very funny and like casually progressive, in a sort of ‘of course people should love however they want to, that’s just what a reasonable world is like’ sort of way, and the music was good. It also felt good that there was a nontrivially large mask-wearing minority and that we were part of it, that was a nice feeling.
It was also nice to see the kid enjoying her thing (it’s her thing and more than mine, though I do dig it), and it was nice to get to spend so much time with her. She’s super cool, I’m a big fan. It’s wild to me that she could in a college in just a few years. It’s wonderful to get to see her starting to make for herself who she’s going to be, and it’s a little hard as she’s moving into a phase where her need for time with me is satisfied by X time while my need for time with her is satisfied only by a lot more than X time! It’s fine though, I am at peace.
We got fries and a frosty and a soda at Wendy’s (frosty for her, soda for me) while driving there and then there was a Wendy’s joke in the show, which was a bit of a funny coincidence. She was very patient when I got very excited when the pre-show music included Burial and I wanted to explain who Burial was, and it was fun to chat about the show, our favorite bits and all, on the drive home afterward, and to shoot the breeze a little more generally.
I’ve got nothing funny to say here. (As usual!) Or anywhere else for that matter.
Oh yeah there was a cool moment in the car when “We Got The Beat” came on the radio, which I had turned down low but she recognized it so we turned it up and sang along.
Also before we left she got into a bit of an argument with the youngest child (they’d been playing and youngest was not ready to stop playing in time for to leave) which led to the oldest being somewhat upset, so I brought a small roll of toilet paper for tissue so she could blow her nose. I stuck it in the pocket of my button down shirt, and then I said ‘boy it’d be weird if I forgot to take this out of my pocket and brought it in to the performance, people’d be giving me weird looks like “oh this guy brings his own toilet paper?” and I’d go “what, you never seen a guy who wipes his butt before? you never wipe your butt probly” and I’d elbow you and point and go “get a load of this clown, he doesn’t wipe his butt!”’ and she interrupted me and went ’and I’d say “sorry, were you talking to me?” and I’d turn to the person you were talking to and say “do you know him?”’ and I said ‘you’d pretend you don’t know me?!’ and she said ‘yes absolutely if you make that joke.’ It was a nice bit of banter and came up a couple other times on the trip, and she expressly forbade me to talk about it outside the car which was funny and also very fair! I was like ‘what if I was more polite, like “hey need some to wipe your butt? that’s important, help yourself!”’ and she was like ‘I will absolutely pretend I don’t know you, and I will text mama that you won’t stop saying words.’ That’s a reference to when she was little, one time I was being annoying and she said ‘Mama! Daddy keeps saying words!’ It was very funny then and very funny when she referenced it today.