mostly it.

Turning Thirty

This spring, you’d swear it actually gets dark earlier.
At the elegant new restaurants downtown
your married friends lock glances over the walnut torte:
it’s ten o’clock. They have important jobs
and go to bed before midnight. Only you
walking alone up the dazzling avenue
still feel a girl’s excitement, for the thousandth time
you enter your life as though for the first time,
as an immigrant enters a huge, mysterious capital:
Paris, New York. So many wide plazas, so many marble addresses!
Home, you write feverishly
in all five notebooks at once, then faint into bed
dazed with ambition and too many cigarettes.

Well, what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except
really you don’t believe wrinkles mean character
and know it’s an ominous note
that the Indian skirts flapping on the sidewalk racks
last summer looked so gay you wanted them all
but now are marked clearer than price tags: not for you.
Oh, what were you doing, why weren’t you paying attention
that piercingly blue day, not a cloud in the sky,
when suddenly “choices”
ceased to mean “infinite possibilities”
and became instead “deciding what to do without”?
No wonder you’re happiest now
riding on trains from one lover to the next.
In those black, night-mirrored windows
a wild white face, operatic, still enthralls you:
a romantic heroine,
suspended between lives, suspended between destinations.

– Katha Pollitt

for the first time, 10 miles.

"The miracle isn't that I finished, it's that I had the courage to start."

.2 hours.2 minutes.2 seconds.


and, for the first time in a long time, something to be proud of. an unexpected rush of accomplishment on the morning of finishing my final training run. in two and a half months, i was committed enough to be able to go from barely being able to run ten minutes at a time to being able to run ten miles (albeit not very quickly or gracefully, but still being able to run that ten miles). in college, someone in a writing class - someone who ran cross country - wrote about running and quoted some statistic that said what percentage of americans were able to run more than ten miles at a time. i wish i could remember exactly what it was (i don't), but it was tiny and at the time i assumed my position in the 90-some percent majority was pretty much locked in. but how simple it was to change that. a couple of months and some willpower and time and perhaps one of the most unlikely candidates for distance running can run herself from minneapolis, down a riverbed, back up a riverbed, across the mississippi, into saint paul, up the riverbed some more, and then, with the help of some shark-shaped electrolyte gummies, amped up soft rock stylings, and familial cheerers, can cross the finish line. another pre-30 goal crossed off the list.

also, school of seven bells = good sounds.