Feb
16
Water
Filed Under Uncategorized | 98 Comments
I’m not sure what it is I crave these days. Adventure? Spontaneity? Or muted creature comforts: a quiet room, an uninterrupted stretch of time to laze around in.
All of the above, maybe.
Every day is stacked with routines, one after another. Storybooks, snacks, shoelaces. Cooking, cleaning, commuting. I should be wearing this life like a broken-in pair of jeans, every frayed edge and accommodating curve a comfortable familiarity. I should be managing this on muscle memory alone.
It doesn’t seem to work that way, though. At odds with the day-in, day-out patterns is this sense of impermanence to everything. The ground is insecure, it’s untrustworthy. One minute everything is fantastic, the next my patience is nearly gone and I’m pacing in my brain like a zoo animal. I wish sometimes that my children would just be quiet and predictable for an hour at a time, but they aren’t, they can’t. They buzz from one distraction to the next, they laugh and scream and cry. They are all wild oscillations and unstable surfaces.
I do the laundry but it never gets done. I clean the floor but it never stays clean. I put on my running shoes but every block is an unknown, I can so easily switch from feeling strong and motivated to fighting every hateful, shitty step. I eat healthfully and happily, then switch to crap for an entire weekend, unable to stop. My sense of worth at my job can be undone with one email.
Everything in my day used to revolve around the contents of a bottle, and at least this isn’t true anymore. It’s hard, though, to take back control only to realize I don’t really have it, and maybe I never truly will. I am like everything else, constructed of delicate material that sometimes doesn’t hold up, defined by things that are in flux.
It is stupidly hard to do the things you set out to do.
So, there is this: trying the best you can. There is this: pushing yourself past of what you believe you are capable of. There is this: living in the moment you are in, and letting go of the things that have already happened. There is adventure when you can take it, a quiet room when you can find it.
Tomorrow will be like today but it will also be different and you won’t know how and maybe there is a wild and luscious beauty to that.
Feb
15
Sprung
Filed Under Uncategorized | 42 Comments
This weekend was wonderfully full: a 5K race on Saturday with Ashley, a long run on Sunday (my last double-digit outing before NOLA, can I get a hallelujah?), a lovely valentine from JB and the kids, large amounts of chocolate, a babysitter-powered night away from the house.
(We also saw The Wolfman and I wish like hell all of you had seen it too so I could go off about all the hilarious bits in it, especially when [REDACTED] choked himself at the end of a chain just like a cartoonishly stupid dog, or [REDACTED] ripped open his shirt like an aging WWF fighter, or at the end during what was surely supposed to be a touching scene [REDACTED] was reflected in [REDACTED’S] eyes and JB leaned over and hissed “Unfollow” in my ear.)
The best part, though, was the mild weather that showed up on Sunday afternoon. After months of being cooped up indoors, it was utterly magical.
The difference between a cold, rainy Sunday, and this? Epic. Come on, SPRING.
PS: Yes, Dylan’s pretty much bald. I left the house for two hours on Saturday morning and came back to that. Please also note the extreme, probably-fatal prunejob of the little tree to the right of Riley in the fifth photo; that’s what happened the last time I ran a 5K. It would seem JB either has some Unusual Issues, or needs a chore chart when I leave the house.
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