feb 7, 2017 / bike / basement
Here’s a list of critters I had seen up to that point:
list! critters spotted by/near the mississippi river
- fox
- coyote
- wild turkeys (rafter of them!)
- beaver
- muskrat
- possum
- raccoon
Anymore to add? squirrel (of course), mouse, chipmunk
feb 7, 2018 / 4.2 miles / 6 degrees, feels like -3 / 100% snow-covered
This moment with the hat made it into one of my poems that I’m still trying to revise:
My shadow ran with me today. She was my friend, leading me along. About a mile into the run one of the tassels on my hat, which had been my mom’s cross country skiing hat before she died, hit my shoulder like it was tapping me, trying to get my attention. My mom saying hello? I imagined her there with me.
I don’t wear that hat in the winter anymore. The only winter thing of my mom’s that I’ve been wearing is a long gray coat that I started wearing this winter for some reason. Now, if I wear anything from a dead mother, it’s Scott’s mom’s purple jacket.
I can’t quite remember when I stopped driving for good, but in this entry I must have still been driving because I wrote this:
I was stuck in a car, trying to drive
feb 7, 2020 / 1.2 miles / basement
Wanted to note what I watched, Cheer!, and listened to:
listened to Jad Abumrad’s podcast about Dolly Parton called Dolly Parton’s America. So good. Right now, I’m listening to episode 4–or is it 5? I have loved Dolly Parton ever since she yelled at her boss in 9 to 5, calling him “evil to the core.” I loved that movie when I was kid. I even taught it in the spring of 2007 in my Pop Culture Women course.
And, psst, the pandemic is coming. I think this every year when I reread entries from early 2020. I had no idea what was coming up next.
feb 7, 2021 / 3.4 miles / basement / outside temp: feels like -19
Something to note: my heart rate averaged 144 for a 30 minute run! That’s about as low as I go. Running on the treadmill is good for helping me to slow down. I wish I could keep my heart rate that low outside.
Thanks past Sara for taking the time to recount your thoughts on this episode of Dickinson!
Before I ran, I biked. Watched most of the 4th episode of Dickinson. This one is about Emily and her efforts to protect her beloved oak tree from being cut down to make way for progress/a railroad. She travels with George (the student editor of the Amherst College paper who is in love with her) to Concord to enlist Thoreau’s help. She was in Thoreau’s cabin–having been escorted there by his mother who was collecting his laundry to wash–asking him for help when I finished my bike workout. This show’s take on Thoreau: he’s a douchey, over-privileged poser who is pampered by the women in his life: his mother does his laundry, his sister is always baking him his favorite cookies. Earlier in the episode, as Emily and George travel to Concord by train, they discuss marriage. Emily’s take: marriage sucks for women but is great for men. Their wives do all the work–taking care of the house, the kids, while they get to do “whatever their heart’s desire.” I wonder if either Emily’s opinion or Thoreau’s douchiness will change in the next 10 minutes, which is what I have left in the episode. And, will she be able to stop the railroad from being built in her backyard woods? I’ll see tomorrow.
feb 7, 2022 / 2.6 miles / basement / feels like 0
Still watching Dickinson, still grateful to past Sara:
inished the first episode of season 3, which was all about death — Aunt Lavinia’s death, too many young men in the community dying due to the Civil War, Edward (Dad) having chest pains and then almost dying from a heart attack, the barely alive relationship of Austin and Sue. Some of the parallels between the never-ending, nation dividing war and the pandemic seemed a bit heavy-handed, but it was funny to hear Lavinia (sister) lamenting her lost 20s because of the war: “It’s soooo boring and taking sooo long. This is our 20s, we’re supposed to be having fun!”
I was working on a poem for a themed episode of Hearth & Coffin on what you see is what you get during this time. Here are some of my thoughts about a related concept, the as-is:
I talked about the “as is” as the old, out-dated, bargain basement, and progressive lenses versus bifocals and how the type of cone dystrophy I have is progressive cone dystrophy because my vision has not stabilized and is continuing to grow worse — it’s progressively deteriorating, as opposed to stationary cone dystrophy where your vision stays at the same level; it’s already lost what it’s going to lose. The progress I’m experiencing is progress as getting worse not better, which is a type of progress that rarely gets mentioned in all the appeals to it. This reminds me of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothingand a line she has about capitalism wanting uncontrolled/unlimited growth and how that’s what cancer is. I found it on goodreads:
But beyond self-care and the ability to (really) listen, the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and are as productive in the same way.How to Do Nothing/ Jenny Odell
I also found a similar, and much earlier quotation by the park ranger/ troublemaker/ writer/ environmental activist Edward Abbey:
growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.Edward Abbey
About a mile later, my thoughts went in a different direction with the as is. Here is some of the notes I recorded into my phone mid-run:
- “as is” in terms of metaphor — I think I was thinking about the “as” or “as in this or that…” — and how what you see is what you get is the opposite of metaphor, the what that you see is what it is and nothing else, not almost or approximate.
- what you see = your perspective, how you perceive/interpret/understand the world is how it is (or, more precisely how it seems/appears) to you. I was thinking particularly about my struggles to see/recognize other people’s faces and how I imagine others see me as rude or distant or unfriendly because of it. But, do they, or is that how I see myself?
Could I return to this and make it into a poem?
feb 7, 2023 / 4.5 miles / 36 degrees / 100% slick sloppy mess
To remember: puddles!