Month: July 2022

So, I Ran Every Day for a Year

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I can’t remember the last time I made a plan for something big where I didn’t just “decide to do it” one day for no particular reason.

Case in point, last year, somewhere around mid-May, I decided I was going to run every day for a year.

Well, to be really specific, I didn’t decide it would be “every day for a year,” I just decided I was going to run every day. Every day, at least a mile, I would run. For how long? Who knows? It was just a thing I wanted to try out and see how far I could go.

(Disclaimer: Let me say at the outset, here, that running every day is not a thing you should take on lightly, as I did. I’ve been running for over 10 years and have a pretty good sense of what I’m capable of …. check with your doctor, or something.)

So I went for my regular Monday morning run, and then on Tuesday morning, I got up and took a quick tour around the neighborhood (just over a mile). Then on Wednesday, regular speedy run (speedy for a forty-something unathletic dude), and on Thursday, another easy jaunt around the neighborhood. Friday and Sunday runs as usual, with another short one on Saturday to round out the week.

Well, that week went okay, so I did it again the next week. And after that second week went without incident, I figured, why not go for a full month?

Then, with a month in the bag, why not try for another? And then, with two down, another month is a full-on quarter of a year, so … yeah, sure, let’s try for it. Three months in, I’m halfway to half of a year, and I’m not suffering any more than usual, so yeah, let’s go for six months with at least a mile every day.

This is where the prospect of going for a full year starts to set in. You can do just about anything for a few weeks, or even a couple months, but finding the time and the energy and the drive to run every day for 180 days in a row is a thing that comes with its own challenges, and then you’re thinking about doing it all again. And here’s where, as a teacher, what might have made sense in May became a lot trickier in August — over the summer, if I didn’t wake up early for the run, I could get after it later in the day, and the only drawback would be the late morning heat. Once the school year is in session, sleeping through the alarm for the morning run just isn’t an option — *if* you want to keep the streak going.

(Here, too, is where I come down on myself like a ton of bricks for slacking so badly on the writing over the past *let’s-not-actually-talk-about-how-long-it’s-been* while maintaining this other commitment. Then again, these are different types of commitments with different requirements, but still … if I’m not hating on myself for one thing or another even in the midst of tremendous accomplishments, then I’m not really myself.)

There came a point — maybe after three months, maybe after six, certainly after nine — where I decided I’d sunk in enough time toward this thing that to give it up would really be selling myself short. And, not for nothing, I was enjoying myself. There’s a lot to be said for the beneficial psychology of having a “win” first thing in the morning, and getting that mile in — even if that was *all* I did — was enough to tick that box every day. So I marked the calendar, girded my shoes, and didn’t think about it too much — except for on the occasional morning where I *really, really, really* wanted to snooze the alarm, when that brutal inner voice would whisper “are you really going to let the streak end today? Is this the day when you turn back into a pumpkin?” (My inner voice is a jerk and often mixes its metaphors.)

But the point of this post isn’t the streak, it’s how I embarked upon it, to wit: callously, on a whim, and without much if any consideration for the long term. At no point in the first 5%, 10%, even the first 20% of the undertaking did I say “Yeah, I’m going to do this for a year.” Rather, it was a “well, let’s see if I can push it a little further, and we’ll see how I feel at the end of the week, or the month, or after I get through this difficult weekend.”

Yeah, I still run in these goofy things. Note the holes in the soles. My feet look like the Flintstones.

I finally took a day off after 402 days in a row (having gone a full month and change past the full year because, at a certain point, it becomes stranger to *not* do the thing than to keep after it), that day being in mid June, just over a month ago.

I took that day off because I had bloody well earned it, because I was exhausted and beaten up to a point I’ve not often been in this life, and certainly not within recent memory. I had to rest. Not resting was not an option, because I found a New Thing to satisfy that morning workout … and scratch some other itches, too.

But more on that another day.

I’m still exercising every day, but I’m down to only three or four days running — and that’s fine. I’m even, crazily enough, feeling the urge, some days, to sneak in a quick mile on those days when I *don’t* run, because after so long running every day, it somehow feels like getting away with something if I *don’t*.

Maybe I’ll shake that off, maybe I won’t. Still, this is now officially A Thing I Have Done, and I guess that’s worth being proud about.

And you know, I think if I *had* started back in May of 2021 with the goal of “running at least a mile every day for a year”, I don’t know if I’d have been as successful. The commitment at that point, from just starting out, is almost too big to process, too big to be borne. I have to do this *every single day*, starting today, when yesterday, I did nothing like it? Maybe that works for some people, but it sure doesn’t for me.

The point here is, I think — for me, at least — that as much as you *can* get good things out of planning and visualizing and forethought, there’s no substitute (and it may even be better) to just jump in and *start doing a thing*. For one thing, one way to make sure you’ll never finish a thing is to never start it.

The Black Phone and The Karate Kid are the same movie (just with different amounts of murder)

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Know how you’ll be, like, watching a thing, or reading a thing, and your brain just sort of wanders off to wherever brains wander off to, and flicks a switch, and all of a sudden everything makes sense? (If you could control when this happens, one imagines we’d live in a world much, much different than the one we apparently live in).

That happened to me when I was watching The Black Phone, and I don’t know if the switch that got flicked is super smart or super dumb or, I dunno, maybe it’s just like super obvious? I mentioned this to my wife and she wasn’t impressed — I got a big “yeah, so?” — so I bring it to the internet, where people love things and nobody says anything mean ever, to validate myself. So here it is.

Oh, and, fairly major spoilers for The Black Phone, and also I guess for The Karate Kid. This is where you get off if you care about such things.

So, I was watching The Black Phone — which, while I’m not going to do a full-on review of it, given there’s been plenty of that for this pretty excellent not-exactly-horror movie (it’s more of a thriller, in that there’s just this looming and inescapable sense of dread permeating the whole thing from top to bottom) — is a pretty excellent movie. But I couldn’t shake this feeling that was really bugging me.

Consider the central conceit: a kid is napped and brought into a sadistic murderer’s basement prison. In this prison, though, is a Black Phone, which Doesn’t Work, but our protagonist begins receiving calls on it from the ghosts of the sadistic murderer’s victims, ostensibly to help him escape. Problem is — and here’s what was really bugging me while I was watching — the things the ghosts are telling him aren’t actually helping him to escape.

Well, what the hell kinda good is it being dead if you don’t get the power to see beyond seeing? You want to help this kid escape and you tell him what to do and … it doesn’t work.

Seriously. Ghost #1 tells him he needs to dig thru the floor and up around the side of the house but … there just isn’t nearly enough time for that. Ghost #2 provides him with a handy-dandy wire to climb and reach the barred window — but all it does is yank the grating out of the frame. Ghost #3 tells him to punch thru a wall into the back of the freezer … but he can’t unlock the doors from the inside and getting into the freezer doesn’t help. Only Ghost #4 (our protag’s buddy taken just before our protag himself) helps him in a direct way, by giving him a quick combat lesson and telling him to use the up-until-now apparently useless phone in a concrete way.

But then, it all works in the end, right? The half-pit he digs turns into a Vietnam-guerilla-warfare trap pit, the displaced window grate turns the pit into a full-on spike trap, and the freezer access gives him an out to get past the guard dog after the big bad is dispatched.

And I realized:

This is The Karate Kid.

You see it, right? I’m talking about the classic, of course — I haven’t seen the remake — where young, goofy Daniel LaRusso finds himself in a strange place, beset by bullies, looking for a way to stand up for himself. He convinces local karate master Mister Miyagi to train him, and this feels like the way out — until he shows up to the old man’s house.

“Paint the fence,” the old man says. Danny, confused but willing to do what it takes, dutifully paints Miyagi’s fence. Finished, he asks if they can train now, and Miyagi tells him, no, go home, rest. He comes back again. Time to train? Miyagi nods. “Sand the floor.” Danny sands the entire deck and gets sent home again without training. Next day? “Wax these cars. Wax on, wax off.” Really frustrated but still determined, Danny does the work.

Then, the inevitable blow-up. When Miyagi sets him another chore, Danny freaks out. I wanted karate training, I didn’t want to remodel your backyard and fix up your cars, old man. Miyagi, stoic ever, says “show me paint the fence.” Miyagi throws a punch as Danny does the motion — and Danny perfectly blocks the attack.

Miyagi was training Daniel all along by teaching him fundamental movements. Miyagi gave the boy tools and drilled them into automaticity so that when the time came for the real work, he’d be ready for it.

Why? Because Miyagi had the long view. If he’d tried to give Daniel the complicated stuff right away, tried to give him the blueprint to beat up his bullies, it wouldn’t have worked — because the fundamentals were not in place. There was prep work to be done.

So it is in The Black Phone. Each ghost, like Miyagi, plants a seed that will come to fruition during the final confrontation, even if the seed itself seems useless, or, worse, an outright waste of time in the moment.

So, uh, that’s it. That’s my great big realization. These two movies couldn’t be more different, but they share the same through-line. They’re both these coming-of-age movies, both center on a kid who needs to stand up for himself, and they both get mentors who bread-crumb him to success rather than just giving him the tools and techniques straight-out.

Point is, there are only so many stories to be told out there — what matters isn’t the story itself, but how you tell it. Which is pretty cool, I guess — and a good thing for budding storytellers to keep in mind.

Terrible Reviews: The Violence

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I knew that this book had come out, and I was conflicted about it. On the one hand, I’m a fan of Delilah S. Dawson’s books that I’ve read before, so I kinda knew I was gonna read it … but the writeup made me nervous.

Three generations of abused women must navigate their chilling new reality as a mysterious epidemic of violence sweeps the nation in this compelling novel of self-discovery, legacy, and hope.

Now, nothing against stories with female protagonists, or anything like that … but I read “compelling novel of self-discovery, legacy, and hope” and I think “Eat, Pray, Love” and … that’s just not my thing, man.

But you can’t get to that last phrase without reading about the “mysterious epidemic of violence” and that very much *is* my thing, man.

Mild spoilers only for this review ahead. I’m going to do my best to talk about this delightful book without giving too much away, as it really does deserve to be experienced with its surprises intact.

Truthfully, I’ve not been reading as much as I would like this year (throw that in the bucket with everything else I’m not doing as much as I’d like in the past couple years…. let’s not talk about any of that) and even when I do, it’s a little bit here and a little bit there, and it kinda feels like a slog. But The Violence was, for me, that rare book that you legitimately do not want to put down.

From the first mini-climax where the main protagonist (yeah there are 3 main female characters but Chelsea, the wife and mother, is pretty obviously the central figure) escapes her abusive husband, I was glued to the pages and cheering on the inside … and then I realized I was only a quarter of the way into the book.

And it’s a wild ride for the rest of the story. Most of the book takes place in a wild hellscape where at any moment, the person sitting across from you could rage out and murder you for no particular reason, which is both extremely unsettling and extremely understandable in a post-COVID world (yeah, I know, we’re not exactly post-COVID because it’s here to stay, but because it’s here to stay and everybody has had the chance to get vaxxed or take whatever preventative measures they plan to, we’re essentially post-COVID, again, let’s not get sidetracked). On the one hand, it’s metaphorical — that person looks harmless but they could very well actually kill you, in the way anybody carrying a deadly communicable disease could. But here in The Violence, it’s terrifyingly literal and immediate. Dawson has somehow captured that uncertainty inherent in every personal interaction in 2022 (is this person a threat to me if I do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing?) and made it tangible, and that’s something.

What’s fascinating about this book is how the protagonists go from fearing this disease, to exploiting it, to coping with it in a way that’s safe for them and for everybody around them. The turns are unexpected, the payoffs are huge, and the climax is as satisfying as could be hoped for.

Look, I was about to wrap it up right there, and I know I said only mild spoilers, but I can’t help it. I can’t talk about this book without gushing a little bit. Each of the three central women faces an oppressive male figure, and each of them deals with her abuser in a creative, unexpected, and satisfying way, the central character actually doing so twice.

Damn, I just can’t. I just can’t with this book. It’s so good, and it’s so enjoyable, and I loved it, and I wish I could re-read it and be surprised again.

This is not your mom’s female empowerment novel; this one is bloody, and terrifying, and so, so good.

Five out of five pink plastic makeup cases, all splattered with blood.

For good measure, a couple of passages so good I had to yoink them for the ol’ quote book:

To think: Two huge, earth-shattering, terrifying things happened yesterday, and yet here she is at the breakfast table, pouring a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles.

“Never make yourself smaller to suit someone who wants to feel big.”

…she realizes that out of all of them, Brooklyn might make it to adulthood in one piece, not weighed down by the bullshit trauma they’ve been passing along hand-to-hand like a coveted recipe that always omits some important ingredient out of spite.

Do yourself a favor: head on down to the ol; bookstore, or your library, or your fancy clicky e-reader and give The Violence a try. And make sure your immediate area is clear of Yeti beverage tumblers … it turns out they can be lethal in close quarters.