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Archives from 2002-2006

It is cold when I start and my body rebels in all the usual ways. The first five minutes are the worst, and then it’s like the cement between my joints finally warms and bends and I stop feeling like the Tin Man jolting my way down the street. The flap of my iPod cord and the shifting waistband of my pants retreats from the front of my mind, my breath deepens, my brain seems to realize that death is not yet imminent and the frantic messages to STOP THIS IMMEDIATELY quiet to the point where I can ignore them for now.

There is a sweet spot in running, and the more you do it, the better chance you have of widening that spot and staying inside it for longer. At least, this has been my experience. Maybe some people run inside it the entire time, like they’re encased in some glorious bubble where the oxygen stays rich and the muscles fresh. Me, I tend to suffer for a while, then I finally enter the spot, then all too quickly I run right out the other end and suffer my way home.

I wish I could set my brain to more creative pursuits while I am running, but mostly I think about the fact that I am running. I am digging around to find the reserves to keep going. Even when I trained for the marathon 2 years ago and learned to run for hours at a time, I pretty much spent all that time telling myself to keep going.

This isn’t pleasant, really. I am envious of people who can lose themselves in audiobooks or the scenery or their own wandering thoughts while the miles pass by. I feel like running is as mentally exhausting as flying through turbulence—those flights when you become convinced you are the one holding the plane aloft by the strength of your own fretting. Keep going, keep going, come on, come on.

Still, maybe that kind of running holds its own magic. You can do this, you can do this. Say it enough and you start to believe it. Say it enough and it stops just being about running.

I have a babysitter who comes to the house three days a week, usually from 11-2 PM. This is by far my most productive work time, because—and here’s something I didn’t 100% totally completely grok with fullness a year ago—working from home with kids around is, like, really hard.

It makes a pretty big difference in my week to be able to get out now and then in order to grind out some deadlines, but there is, of course, the small matter of finding some place to go.

For a while I went to a coffee shop, but I gave that up because 1) the wireless was always slow or spotty, 2) I felt like a dick buying one coffee and taking up a chair for three hours, and 3) it was infusing me with roasted bean stench. My hair, my laptop bag, my clothes—it was worse than being in a smoky bar, I swear to god.

I’ve tried the large food court area of a local mall, where you can find one of a zillion tables and pick up the nearby library’s wireless, but this got depressing real fast. It’s, you know, a food court. It’s loud and messy and the chairs suck and it’s just kind of bleak.

So for the last several months, I’ve been going to the library. It’s perfect in most ways—it’s quiet, the wireless is great, the couches are comfy. The only problem is that it’s full of people being as silent and self-contained as possible. No one is talking or interacting with each other, except for harried mothers chasing toddlers through the kids’ section. This is a great environment for focusing on work, but for someone who is already so isolated from other adults, it’s, I don’t know, it’s like being there every week is contributing to this growing sensation that I am disconnected from everything. There I sit with my laptop, ostensibly around other people, but sealed into my own muted world.

It’s lonely.

(I’m not sure if I’m describing this well.)

Have any of you tackled the issue of working without an office? Did you find a good solution for those times when it’s better to work outside the home? Did anything help stave off the feeling that you were, ha ha, slowly morphing into freakish recluse doomed to eventually develop an obsession for urinating in jars and putting Kleenex boxes on your feet?

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