Friday!
Fri-yay!
Friends, first, I need shoe recommendations, because the mythical black, flat, work-appropriate but not painful OR ugly shoe has yet to be invented. Please reply and tell me what you love, remembering that I’m on my feet a lot at work and would prefer something to look good with both pants and skirts. IT’S IMPOSSIBLE.
Before we get to my usual yammering, I have to share this. I started off my workday with the greatest Tweet of all time, because Lesley knows me so well. Please enjoy:
Thoughts this week
Let me tell you a little bit about my “runner’s high.” First of all, I kind of think that it’s a myth? I mean, I’ve been running now for over 8 years, and I don’t really ever end runs feeling euphoric. (I ended my single half-marathon feeling accomplished, but also like I’d like to go to bed for 3 days and maybe not walk for a week.) Caffeine has always been my drug of choice, and I doubt it’s surprising to know that I, someone who most identified with Margaret in old Dennis the Menace cartoons, don’t have any experience with any stimulants harder than that. Which is maybe why the feelings I do experience while running are so fascinating to me.
To start off, a disclaimer: I’m a real runner, because I run. I’m not, however, a *good* runner. I don’t like to push myself, speedwise, and would be perfectly content if all my runs were on flat, shady trails where I can slog along happily in the far right of the road, being passed by parents pushing jogging strollers, elderly speedwalkers, and toddlers on tricycles (no, really. I have raced kids on trikes. I’ve “let them win.” It’s great).
I do feel something during a run. But instead of euphoria, what I feel most when I run is an incredible feeling of connectedness. I’m connected to myself. I’m connected to the nature that’s around me. If there are other people around, I feel connected to them as well. When I was running the Peachtree last week, this manifested in me feeling SO EXCITED for everyone there that I couldn’t keep a smile off my face (erm, for the first few miles, that is). We were running! We were all doing a thing together! Life is good!
Maybe that IS the euphoria, the runner’s high? Maybe it’s less about stimulation and more about knowing that we’re all in this together, even if “this” is a ridiculously long, hot run on the morning of the only day I will be able to sleep in that week? Maybe the runner’s high is an acknowledgement that we are collectively bananas. That may be true, but the fact is that I miss it when I don’t have it. So, I’ll continue to jog slowly on the right, getting passed, and be happy to be with other people who are similarly not right in the head.
Book Recommendation of the Week
There’s been buzz about Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new book, Daisy Jones & The Six, since at least April. I know, because that’s when I added myself to the library reserve list, and only got the book last week. It was worth the wait.
Reid writes the inner lives of her characters SO WELL, as I know from reading her previous book, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (also recommended). This skill is used to great effect in Daisy Jones, as the conceit is that it’s an oral history of the rise and flameout of a famous 70s rock band, called, of course, Daisy Jones & The Six. (For my grammar nerd friends, “The” is capitalized because its part of the band name. Don’t worry! I haven’t forgotten all rules of capitalization!)
I was born in 1977 and remember . . . none of the 70s. But this glimpse of the excesses - the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll - was a wild ride into what a certain segment of America was experiencing at that time, and it was a blast to read. Through each individual character, but mostly Daisy and Billy, the lead singer of The Six, the reader learns more about how what gives you life (mostly uppers and then some downers), eventually will kill you. As I said, Reid knows her characters inside out, and it was amazing to me how she could maintain the individual voices of so many people as each chronicled their role in the band’s success, and eventual destruction.
It would be easy for the reader to hate these characters. After all, they sort of hate themselves. But I think Reid’s greatest triumph is that we don’t hate them, we care for them and want them to do better. You’ll have to wait for the epilogue to see if they managed it.
Around the internet
This story ends just as it’s getting good. I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS. I also want to avoid being a cantankerous retiree!
To prevent the arrival of the day when they would be a bunch of cantankerous retirees fighting with each other, they decided that each of them would pick up a different skill that would be useful to their lives in retirement.
My one story about team sports is how I played soccer in a YMCA league when I was 5, and my team was undefeated. (Also, I was confused about the game and thought I had to stay in the spot where the coach put me and wait for the ball to come to me; let’s say my team was undefeated despite me, and not because of me.) Anyway, I don’t care much about soccer, but this story about Megan Rapinoe’s relationship with her brother isn’t about soccer so much as it’s about family. I loved it.
The face, the charisma, the wit, the tendency to burst into song: In so many ways, Brian and Megan are alike. But they are also a study in contrasts: At 15 years old, Brian brought meth to school and has been in and out of incarceration ever since. At 15, Megan played with her first youth U.S. national team and started traveling the world. As a young inmate and gang member, Brian was inked with swastika tattoos -- an allegiance to white supremacy that he now disavows; as a professional soccer player, Megan was the first prominent white athlete to kneel to protest racial inequality.
I love New York City, and I love old photographs, so I definitely loved this.
Was the moon landing faked? (No, no it was not.)
The internet’s biggest stars are using irony and nonchalance to refurbish old conspiracies for new audiences, recycling them into new forms that help them persist in the cultural imagination. Along the way, these vloggers are unlocking a new, casual mode of experiencing paranoia. They are mutating our relationship to belief itself: It is less about having convictions than it is about having fun.
I’ve never had a Nanaimo bar, but definitely wouldn’t turn it down if one of my Canadian friends offered me one!
This article about colonial penmanship (and the secret messages encoded therein!) was fascinating. (I’ve been told by some that my handwriting isn’t good. Ahem.)
I don’t care at all about basketball, and popcorn isn’t really my thing, but I was absolutely charmed by this look at how seriously Steph Curry takes popcorn.
See you next time!
