Personal Landscapes.

So much has happened. So much is happening.

The past two months have been one long rollercoaster. I went from cheerfully, hopefully unemployed to despondent, defeated unemployed. I started preparing to: move across the country, relinquish having my own living space, leave the friends I have built so much of my life around, introduce myself to an unfamiliar job market, and try to figure out how I could possibly pay off my loans while living entirely off my sister’s generosity. I received a phone call I hadn’t dared to hope for, offering me a new and exciting job. I spent one week in an ecstasy of relief and accomplishment and the next in a rictus of nervousness and apprehension.

There were days of my head spinning so quickly that I couldn’t focus on anything and subsequent days of delight and exhaustion. I felt pride in my capabilities and a terror that the people who had hired me would decide they had made a terrible mistake. There was a week of illness during which I ran out of several important medications, such as antihistamines, and I recovered from that only to plunge into the depths of magnolia blossoms and misery. (Spring can end now, thank you.)

This week, just as I was preparing to rejoice in beginning my fifth week of productive employment and celebrate with a trip to the pharmacy, Patriots’ Day saw the worst disaster my city has seen in decades, if not longer.

There are no words to properly describe the emotional state I have been in for the past few days. I was so deeply wrapped up in the stress of having a new job, the discomfort of fighting a cold and the limitations of budgeting after three and a half months of unemployment that I had nothing left to devote to processing an act of violence against the city I love.

I have so many conflicting, spiraling thoughts that a yard stick couldn’t make a straight line from them.

My personal history with major life transitions has always been rocky. I knew that landing a job that would challenge me, that would teach me new things, would be a shock to my system. I haven’t been challenged by anything in years; at least, not challenged in the way that needing to learn a new skill set and an entirely new industry would challenge me. As far as my work life, I have become downright complacent and lazy. The only challenges I faced in the working world up to this point have been in sheer work volume, not in topic or difficulty or innovation. While I relished the idea of having to struggle to complete a satisfactory day’s work, I was positively terrified by the realization that being new to things would mean that I probably wouldn’t be excellent at them. I am, after all, a perfectionist.

During the past few weeks, unwinding and ignoring stress at the end of the work day led to an obsession with Doctor Who. I had used my tax refund to finally – finally! – get Internet for my apartment and I abused BBC streaming with alacrity. Unfortunately, in this as in many other things, I abandoned all good sense and spent more than a few days getting (unhealthily) attached to characters and living, breathing in epic high-drama. This past Sunday, I watched a particularly emotional episode and immediately transitioned into a deeply personal conversation with an old friend who asked for my insight into a number of different matters. There followed a stretch of overwrought sensitivity and overactive imagination.

Going into Monday morning, I was sleep-deprived, worried, pensive, nostalgic, unsettled and anxious. Good conversations with coworkers, some kind words from my team and the realization that I had made it past lunch without feeling completely out of my depth combined to make me feel more relaxed and confident than I had felt for quite a while, despite the itching of my eyes. The stress of the previous evening melted away and I started to feel somewhat chuffed about my day.

I like to have my cell phone set to display a virtual fish tank while I work; I can glance down and take a breath and watch some carp swim around, a moment of zen, while I try to remember which process document applies to whatever I’m working on. I always leave it on my desk. I rarely expect it to buzz. When it buzzed in the middle of Monday afternoon, I glanced down.

Tell me you’re ok.

That is not a typical message from my mother. Even considering the teary phone call I made to her Sunday, thanking her for her support and encouragement over the years, it seemed somewhat overly dramatic. If she’d wanted to see if a good night’s sleep had calmed me down, she would have waited until after work to call me. Still…I sent her a quick note just saying that I was in good shape.

Then she asked if I had heard the explosion. And how close I was to the marathon.

Phones started pinging all over the office. Parents, friends, roommates, classmates, everyone was trying to find out where everyone else was. At our distance and height, neither of the explosions were audible and the sirens were muffled.

News started pouring in from the television, from people reading aloud from websites, from text messages and emails. Our office has sight lines to MIT, Bunker Hill, the Harbor Islands, Logan, I-93, the Fort Point Channel, but there is one tall building directly across the street that blocks our view of Chinatown and, just beyond, Copley Square.

Many offices in Boston are closed on Patriots’ Day. It is a distinctive holiday of re-enactments and athleticism and tourism. If offices didn’t close, there honestly wouldn’t be enough room for the events in the city. And Boston is small, smaller than seems possible. Everything in Boston is near everything else. You can walk from the edge of Brookline across the city to the shores of the North End in roughly half an hour. What you can’t do is get from downtown Boston to the suburbs – Brighton, Medford, Quincy – without taking mass transit.

It was as I stood in the break room, sipping a bottle of water and wondering if it would be better or worse if I could see all the way to Copley, that the reality hit me.

Terrorism. In Boston. In my home, in my land, in the city I had repeatedly considered the likelihood of attack on and dismissed. Every September for the last nine years, I have thought about the possibility of such an event and decided that there was no way we would ever end up on someone’s list.

In that moment, staring blindly across an alley at a brick building that hid smoke from view, I realized that I have a form of latent PTSD from the other severely traumatic event of my life: September 11, 2001. Suddenly, I couldn’t be alone. I could not face the prospect of being alone in that room with my thoughts. I thought about going home to my quiet apartment in the suburbs and shook. I had a desperate urge, a physical need, to call everyone I went through that first horrendous day with and verify that they were all right. (I didn’t need to. Nearly all of them beat me to it.) I kept picturing a fireball and people jumping out of the windows of a skyscraper, even though Copley is populated largely by older, lower buildings. As the afternoon wore on, I became more and more paralyzed with the shock. I couldn’t decide what to do with myself. I couldn’t stop watching the live blogs. I couldn’t figure out how to get home by any manner other than the subway past a questionable situation at the JFK library or a three hour walk. I couldn’t even let myself think about being alone.

Then, the office closed down. Everyone still lingering needed to leave. As confused as I was, as incapable of processing as I was, I headed for the subway station and stood dithering while I tried to decide which direction to head. A station attendant told me that nothing had been said about the situation near JFK and trains were still running there, but still running through two downtown stations without stopping. I could have gone home. I couldn’t be alone. I headed to Cambridge, opposite the direction of my apartment, and found myself entirely unable to handle the fact that I was on a crowded subway car underneath a massive crime scene. Topped off by a signal problem at the end of the route that caused a delay, I was ready to have a nice, screaming meltdown by the time I clawed myself out of the train and back above ground.

Despite the careful no-news-watching policy my friends and I adopted that night in favor of simple togetherness and mindless comforts (read: MarioKart 64), that intense anxiety stayed with me. When I drifted home Monday night, safe, and back to work on Tuesday morning, safe, I retained the achingly taut shoulders. I distracted myself with work every bit as thoroughly as I’d distracted myself from work!stress with television shows.

The logical portion of my brain knows that there has been shock and that there are constructive ways of dealing with it; the emotional portion of my brain wants to be as ignorant of the situation as possible. In 2001, I was glued to the news and absorbed every horrific second of it. This time around, I did my best to check in only after lengthy intervals in the hopes that there would be more reliable, more digestible information rather than the same nightmarish stories over and over.

Tonight, I still feel that immense anxiety. After spending my day determinedly burying in arranging paperwork by type and chronology, I realized that distracting myself with podcasts had been A Very Bad Idea Indeed.

I meant well. I listened to a few wonderful storytelling podcasts (The Moth, StoryCorps) and learned about devious bacteria (Science Friday) and then selected a two-part This American Life piece on Harper High School in Chicago. It was magnificent listening. It was fascinating and informative. And it just about crushed me.

Coming off several weeks of very carefully not thinking about the nervousness and worry brought on by a new job, a weekend of intense emotion and three days of utter shock, it was an ethnography of an urban high school that made me realize I needed to do something other than distract myself or I was going to end up curled up in a ball on my kitchen floor, sobbing incoherently and rending my hair at some point in the not-too-distant future. Happily for my sanity, I had no other plans for tonight.

There is no way for me to say “I’ve been dealing with a lot” without making it sound self-patronizing. I know I should cut myself some slack on the job front - anyone is going to have nerves and face a learning curve when starting a new job. I should take solace that none of my friends or family were injured or killed in Monday’s bombings. I should allow myself time to process my shock and the memories this week has brought up, allow myself my current discomfort in crowds, allow myself to be relieved when I see the armed guards on the street, because this is not a normal situation.

I am struggling to show myself compassion. I experience a moment of self-loathing every time I discover that my work performance doesn’t meet my personal expectations. I feel guilty for feeling reassured by the highly visible policemen in the plaza with their bright vests. I am horrified by the assault rifles held by guardsmen even while their uniforms make me feel safe. I am conflicted and distracted and I don’t feel well physically because spring is the time of allergy suffering and because stress and my stomach do not get along well and because I ate too much salt yesterday.

Acknowledging the things that are causing stress is a huge step toward being able to process them, come to terms with them, and move on with life. To be honest, it would be worse if I were feeling nothing right now. Anxiety over a change in life status is a perfectly normal phenomenon. Shock is a common reaction to an unexpected tragic event. Heightened emotions are to be expected when tired, not to mention while reeling from a two-week span of rapid-fire changes in prospects. It would be more worrisome if I didn’t have some kind of emotional reaction to the events of the past week, to the past three months.

The world continues to turn.

I have a new job, with an amazing team and really great coworkers, which is both intellectually stimulating and a fantastic outlet for my organizational OCD. I have wonderful friends all over the country who care about me and about each other. I have supportive, loving parents. I have a sister who sneaks out of her meetings to call me and check in. I have a city of incredible spirit and hearty history that is reacting to extreme violence with love and determination.

While I’m working my way through the process of grieving for the events of the 2013 Boston Marathon, I can take delight in the fact that this entire region is refusing to stall, refusing to be terrorized, refusing to give up on daily life and human kindness. There is a line in the song “Hey California” by Catie Curtis that goes, “People want to know why you’d live back east when the weather there is cold and the people there are cold. I say the people are why I’ll never leave.”

The people are why I am sitting down and writing these thoughts. I want to help my city recover emotionally. I want to help myself recover emotionally. How can you not want to live in a place where people respect your personal space while walking down the street but are willing to share a hug at a moment’s notice? Where even the fiercest scowls can be lifted by the notes of a jig? Where brilliant intellectuals share café tables with scruffy punks? Where every third person you meet works in healthcare or human services? Where directions are given in terms of relation to the Green Monster? Where tour guides in period garb drift amongst the businessmen, the shoppers, the homeless, the athletes, the inventors, the writers, the scientists and the sightseers?

As I said before, Boston is small. Geographically speaking, the vast majority of Boston’s land is actually landfill, earth stolen from the sea. The villages that were originally Boston’s suburbs are more like its neighborhoods now. “Boston” is an umbrella term that can encompass Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, Charlestown, Allston, Brighton, South Boston and East Boston (both of which are practically foreign lands!). The proper term, “Greater Boston Area”, is a mouthful. Boston is rambling, stretching. And we’re a family. Everyone who loves Boston loves Boston fiercely. We delight in our past, in our legacies, in our stories.

Monday’s bombings and emotional aftermath will become one of Boston’s stories, one of my stories. The city and I will mourn, rage, grieve, rant, fuss, abhor, denounce, defy and internalize what has happened here. We will be stronger for it. It will take some time. There will be dark moods and tearful nights and irrational fears and irrational anger but there will also be the confidence that we experienced a tragedy, responded efficiently and compassionately, and are capable of doing so again. It won’t be easy. It probably won’t be pretty. None of that matters. We will come out of this, out of our exhaustion and fear and sadness, and be a people that knows intimately just what wonders it is capable of.

Pillow Fort: UPGRADE

It is dastardly cold in my living room. The kitchen gets all the sun and I would love to spend my time basking in its warmth. Sadly for me, the open wireless network signal that I rely on for budgetary reasons does not reach that side of my apartment. Banished to the window-laden, shaded side of my apartment, I frequently huddle on the sofa under a pile of blankets, wishing I had a means of protecting my nose.

This morning, after spending twenty deliciously cosy minutes enjoying my iced coffee at my kitchen table, I retreated to the cold living room. My intention was to spend my time trying to load the video lecture for the Coursera class I’m taking. The reality was somewhat different.

Five minutes spent retracting into smaller and smaller fetal positions on the cold sofa had me thinking longingly of a nice little cave that could be warmed by my body heat. Then, inspiration struck!

Why not?! I have blankets, pillows, and a papasan chair. I might not be an engineer, but I am nothing if not creative!

I am armed with trail mix, lip balm, Altoids Smalls, and iTunes. Inglebert the dragon is keeping me company. I am rapidly nearing 30 and I have no regrets about the state of my living room.

If only I could get the lecture video to load…!

Who Copies the Copycat?

Reblogged from Because Life Is Better With a Cat On Your Lap:

Everyone likes cat videos. I defy you to find a single human being who has never laughed at a cat video.

Last year, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota sponsored an Internet Cat Video Festival. The turn-out was huge - more than 10,000 people! - and the New York Times featured an article describing the crowd and how the idea grew from a half-joke to a festival blending Internet and real-world cultures.

Read more… 303 more words

You guys, I really really love living the Greater Boston Area. Check out what I'm doing this weekend!

Off the hook!!

My mother texted me last week, saying “Gues what!” It turns out that this is a thing! John Dies at the End!! This is a thing that exists!! You know what this means?

I don’t have to writeeeeeeeee itttttttttttttt! I laughed long and hard in the middle of the subway train. It looks like a blast and I can’t wait to track it down and read it. Clearly, this author has fabulous taste in titles. It sounds absurd and grotesque and right up my alley. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of it before!

Plus, I received an invitation from a Meetup group to go see the movie. I’m tempted to go even though I haven’t read the book; it should fit in nicely with all the Lovecraft I’ve been reading recently. Perhaps not, though. I do poorly with gore. I love zombies but can’t watch zombie movies. Even Shaun of the Dead was a struggle and a half.

Farm-raised salmon has also been a struggle. It was on sale the other day and it’s been a while since I had fresh fish so I went for it. The problem is that I have stuck to wild salmon so long now that the farm raise seems bland and far too fatty. Wild caught fish is much, much better. Enough soy sauce will fix pretty much anything, though, so I made some rice and went with my old college/grad school standby: salted salmon.

I decided that a favorite old food deserved a favorite old pastime to go with it. As I type, I am lounging at my kitchen table with my computer playing old fansubs of a Japanese television show. Maybe I could call it inspiration?

I’m watching Yamada Tarou Monogatari (The Story of Tarou Yamada). It stars a couple of members of my favorite ridiculous rainbow boy band, 嵐 (Arashi). It’s also built around one of my favorite tropes: an incredibly poor student at an incredibly wealthy school.

This all comes up because I had a hot date with corruption yesterday. A friend of mine brought a new face to our most recent game night and she made the mistake of commenting to me that she wanted to watch anime. Yesterday, I introduced her to Ouran High School Host Club. This show is a must watch! Poor student, wealthy school, ridiculous costumes, “commoner” as a descriptor for an alien culture, and a lot of really hilarious characters. She will never be the same and it’s all my fault! Insert glee here.

My new awesome friend has promised to corrupt me with Hot Fuzz in return. Insert additional glee.

I love finding new friends!

Maybe the third cup of coffee is the charm? Or the ninth?

I’m beginning to think that I’m working too hard at this not-working thing. My entire morning so far could be efficiently summed up by that perennial truth, “I can’t brain today. I have the dumb.” So far, GAMES Magazine has forced me to look at the answers for the Kid Stuff Puzzles (a candy that starts with Y?!) and while I solved the last maze I have absolutely no idea what the resulting image is supposed to represent.

I have, however, decided upon a naming theme for any eatery I may happen to own in the future. The menu shall be filled with delicacies such as “Gooey Eggplant of Deliciousness” (eggplant rounds alternated with slices of mozzarella cheese and doused with vegetable-rich tomato sauce, all baked together) and “Iced Coffee of Which There Is Not Enough in the World” (which is self-explanatory, really).

This problem isn’t new today, either. Yesterday, I went to wash a plate and was standing in front of the bathroom sink before I realized that I had walked all the way through the kitchen and something was wrong. I thought that under-caffeination might be the problem, so I had a glass of coffee and sat down to Googlechat with a friend. I informed her that I had repeated something “vertabim” and then spent a full three minutes staring at the red underlining of doom and trying to figure out why it was wrong. I had another glass of coffee and decided to stop being social, instead focusing on my job search. I found an interesting position in Tacoma, Washington and figured that I should check out a map, since what I know about the state of Washington could fit inside the tip of a Monopoly thimble. And then I chortled, “Awwww, look at all the little arpeggios!”

….

Maybe I should have expected that my music!nerd mind would revert to musical terminology when I babble, but I assure you that the word I was looking for was archipelagos.

Archipelagos, archipelagos, archipelagos.

My father keeps telling me that this would be the ideal time for me to get to work writing the Great American Novel. The only possible response I can give to him is:

part a) Did you read Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos? and

part b) I would title it John Dies At the End.

At the end of what? I dunno. Is “Dies” his surname or what he does? No idea. Do his friends call him John or does he go by Jack? You know what? Write the bloody book yourself. I can’t wash my dishes in the right sink, let alone structure a scintillating, whirlwind adventure through the great American mores. Clearly, I am not to be trusted with this. Arpeggios, indeed.

Singing is usually the answer to my incoherence. Actually, singing is usually the answer to a great many of my problems. Oh, how happy the world might be if we all just sang our conversations to each other! No, wait. I tried that for a time, back in high school, and I think my mother almost had me locked away with my insanity. Perhaps I’ll throw myself a little five minute dance party instead. I’ve got some fabulously embarrassing 80s tunes buried in my hard drive, perfect for settling down to a little boogie all alone in my apartment.

    Why don’t they

    Doooo what they say

    Saaay what they mean?

    One Thing Leads Another!

Putting My Self-Occupation Skills to the Test!

The bizarre thing about being unemployed is that I have absolutely no boundaries on when I can do what I want to do. Last week, I called my aunt. She lives in Florida. I usually see her once or twice a year. I hardly ever get to speak with her. But I felt the urge to call her around 11 in the morning and I could. We chatted for about half an hour about my life, her life, my nephew’s life, and all manner of things. It was wonderful! I haven’t had the opportunity to make a phone call without having to do something else at the same time since, oh, maybe college? Wonderful!

The other bizarre thing about unemployment, or at least, my own particular brand of unemployment, is that I’m pretty certain I’m being more productive overall than I have been since I was in grad school. I have sent in job applications, I have researched and written for my volunteering position, I have cooked delicious and nutritious meals, I have read a book, I have knitted coasters, and I have taken small breaks throughout the course of a day to clean things. It’s crazy!

Want to know something else that is crazy? Facebook sending me emails to tell me that I have posted events on my timeline. Uh, yeah, I kind of have this thing called a blog which automatically marks moments of interest in my life. Silly Facebook.

I feel the need to educate the world on one of my favorite things: Gloom.

Gloom is a marvelous game for creative (terrible) people who like to tell stories. I learned about it a few months ago from the web show Tabletop (considered by some, myself included, to be the Best Thing, Period, of 2012). It’s a card game in which a player takes on the responsibility of leading a family of misfits to their doom. The best doom, of course, is one of gloom.

The point of the game is for each player to kill off the members of his or her family after making the characters really, really unhappy people. A character could be “abandoned on the moors” or “shunned by society” for negative self-worth points. The game ends when a player’s entire clan is deceased and the winner is the player whose family, collectively, has the lowest self-worth. Other players can combat the tragic events of a another player’s stories by playing positive self-worth points, making a character “wondrously well wed” or “diverted by drink.”

Gloom is a game for 2-4 people. Don’t let that stop you, though. If you’re a truly horrible person, like me, you might enjoy building up and destroying the social lives of two or more intertwined families all on your own!

[Hey, if nothing else, it's an effective way to pass the time.]

To play Gloom all by your one-cy:

• Pick your characters. You may decide to play just one family, two families, or mix and match characters from any or all of the four clans.
• Draw two hands of five cards. Put one aside and look through the first for some fittingly terrible deeds.
  • If you’re feeling delightfully cruel, you may wish to look for happy events to raise your characters’ self-worth before really putting them through the mill. I happen to find it more satisfying for someone wondrously well wed to be abandoned on the moors and then shunned by society.
• Play by the standard turn rules: play or discard two cards, then draw up to the hand limit. If there are other people in the room, you can downplay your evilness by keeping the stories you make up in your head rather than speaking them aloud. If you’re alone, though, go ahead and narrate to your demented heart’s desire!
• Pick up the other hand and play by the standard turn rules: play or discard two cards, then draw up to the hand limit. Continue the tale!

It can get pretty challenging to keep the story consistent. It’s also sometimes difficult to figure out how to balance your glee at killing off a hapless character with the goal of obtaining the lowest self-worth possible. Some of the Untimely Death cards are just so funny that it almost seems worthwhile to play them right away!

The Tabletop episode about Gloom can be found here and is definitely worth watching. It will give you a good idea of how the game is played and how much fun it can be to be a terrible person. I probably should have made my family watch it before getting them all together to play a few rounds, since my sister is by nature disturbingly cheerful and almost incapable of being mean. She struggled to come up with some dastardly tales of misfortune and tragedy but she did quite well, her expressions of dismay not withstanding. I think she grew more comfortable with it as the game went on and I enjoyed her struggle immensely.

We have established that I’m a horrible person, right?

If you’re bored and looking for an interesting outlet for any pent-up frustration, dark humor and/or creativity, take a look at Gloom.

Come to the dark side!

Feels Like Feeling

What are you looking at, Halfpint?

This venerable gentleman, Spuds, is one of my new best friends (although he may or may not be thrilled with that title). I have signed up to write copy for a cat rescue group, Kitty Connection, and today I took full advantage of the director’s invitation to spend time socializing the cats.

To be entirely honest, a large part of what drew me to spend some of my day with cats is that I have resigned my position and am looking to refocus my career path. I’m in the market for a challenging new position and I welcome suggestions, should anyone have knowledge of interesting opportunities. Working with Kitty Connection is a step toward engaging my more creative side as well as toward healing some of the overextended, exhausted parts of me that want to just curl up in bed and never look at a computer screen or a spreadsheet ever again. Today, a pre-scheduled day off, I was desperate for some simple, hands-on, not-involving-Microsoft interaction.

The other thing that brought me back to the shelter after my introduction to the cats this past Monday was this gorgeous creature:

When I arrived at the shelter Monday evening, straight from the difficult decision to move forward with my career and the nerve-wracking experience of submitting my first resignation, this wonderful fellow besieged my dangling arm with all manner of nuzzles. He purred and he flipped and he snuggled and he purred some more. Standing by the cat tree and petting him was the single most relaxing thing I have done in years. His name is Abraham and I love him. He was every bit as affectionate and cuddly today as he was on Monday and I think I love him even more.

And then there’s this wonderful young man:

This is Tiger. While I was learning the basics of the shelter from the director, Tiger was almost adopted by a family with a young child. I honestly thought he would have a new home when I came back today! He is calm, has a wonderfully rumbly deep purr, and while he was clearly delighted to have someone skritching his shoulder he seemed truly happy with something as simple as leaning his forehead against mine. He has chubby cheeks that I want to cradle in my hands forever.

My family always had pets while I was growing up, everything from a chocolate lab to a frog. We had a Persian cat for years who for some reason tolerated me but no one else (and I was NOT an easy child for any animal to live with, with my obsessive YOU MUST LOVE ME tendencies). A while after getting rid of the (so they say) awful Persian, my parents surprised my sister and me with tuxedo kittens for Christmas. I have an incredible soft spot for tuxedos. There was no way I was going to let this beauty hide away in the back of the cage:

No matter how shy cats are, it’s entirely worth while to coax them from the back corners of their dens for a little love. The cuddling may be brief but that quiet little purr is entirely rewarding.

Some cats require a little advance planning. Cats like Honey.

Honey is gorgeous. She’s young and she’s a typical demanding calico who wants your attention NOW when she wants it and wants you to disappear to Pluto when she doesn’t want you around. She also seems to be the source of enough fur to coat three cats. At least, I’m pretty sure that I could have made an entirely new kitten from the hair that was clinging to my shirt and pants after ten minutes of playing and petting. She is utterly delightful. I did rather wish I’d thought to bring a change of clothing after snuggling with her, though.

And then, THEN! There’s Mr. Climberpants. I believe his real name is Cody but I shall call him Shoulder Cat.

This afternoon, Shoulder Cat had a near desperation to be held. He stretched up and batted at my thigh with his big, polydactyl paws and butted my hands with his head. When I picked him up, he set about rubbing his face all over my chin and shoving his fur up my nose. I couldn’t stop giggling as I held him! When he decided he would get a better vantage point of the room from my shoulder, though, I realized that maybe my arms were not the best place for him. While I can see how it would appear to be a perfectly reasonable path, to a cat, clawing his way to my shoulder via my chest was not my ideal route for him to take.

The sad thing about a cat rescue group is the simple fact that cats have needed to be rescued. Some are so nervous around humans that my unfamiliar presence made them refuse to leave the cat tree for food.

There was a gorgeous black cat tucked into a spacious crate who wanted nothing to do with me. He hissed in fear every time one of the other cats approached his cage (Honey, of course, found him fascinating and kept trying to stick her paws into his space). While I was there, word came around that there was a big rescue operation going on in a neighboring town and thirty cats had been rounded up. A volunteer was already on her way to pick up four of them to bring back to Kitty Connection.

Other cats were simply uninterested in me. There was a marmalade who blinked up at me once or twice and opted to return to his nap rather than come out to receive attention. There was a regal black cat who stared haughtily down at me from her window well perch. There was an elderly gray short-hair who watched everything impassively from atop a small filing cabinet. He was willing enough to receive some gentle skritches but showed no desire to seek them out.

And there was Chuck.

Once he finally deigned to sniff my hand and decided that I was allowed to pet him, this boy engaged in a thoroughly hilarious dance of rolling and twisting and twitching. Half the time, it seemed as though he was perfectly capable of getting a passable experience of “petting” out of squirming around in his chosen tree. I think he liked having an audience to show off for more than he cared about having a hand to stroke his fur.

I am an obsessive animal person. One of the biggest disappointments of college was that I wasn’t allowed to have a pet in the dorms. Once I got out of the dorms and into apartment life, I realized that supporting myself meant that I couldn’t afford to keep a pet. The cat I had left at home with my parents passed away while I was in grad school and I was too raw to think about a companion animal for a while. Working full-time earned me barely enough money to feed myself, let alone another creature. Now that I’m living on my own, my resources and my time are so stretched that it would be nothing but cruel to have so much as a fish tank. Working with Kitty Connection is something that I think I have desperately, deeply, needed.

Cats are fascinating creatures. I know my sister would dispute me on this, since she’s never really been crazy about cats to begin with and grew to loathe them when she became a homeowner whose lawn was widely regarded as a public litterbox. I, on the other hand, adore their unique personalities and their vast array of quirks. I am what might be called “violently” allergic to cats but the moment I see one I have to use all of my restraint to keep from picking it up and burying my face in its fur. I love dogs as well but there’s an entertainment value in a cat that few dogs I have encountered could hope to match.

Cats are a puzzle. They are stimulated by the most bizarre, random things and react unpredictably to things they have encountered a dozen times before. They are a source of never ending delight to me.

And, really, what human isn’t jealous of the ability to purr?

I hardly recognize myself.

I think that’s a good thing.

I have been writing, re-writing and editing this post in fits and bursts for the last four months.

——

My life is so very different from what it was six months ago.

On Sunday, May 6th, I participated in the Walk for Hunger. The Walk is a 20-mile route, open to all walkers regardless of the amount of funding raised, meant to increase awareness of the problem of hunger in Massachusetts. Official statistics tell me that I was one of 43,000 people who walked at least part of the 20 miles. The donations I collected online, for which I thank each and every one of you, contributed to the $3.6 million raised to fund meal programs and food banks in my community.

My goal for the walk was to get as far as possible before my legs, which had only managed to work up to a six-mile walk before the 6th, simply gave up and detached themselves from my body. I figured on that happening at, roughly, mile 10. I spent the vast majority of my time in the two weeks leading up to the event warning my teammates that they had better plan on dragging me.

I started out of the Boston Common with a handful of coworkers and acquaintances at 9 in the morning. We all walked together for five miles, which wasn’t so bad. We chatted, we joked, we stepped along purposefully and kept an eye out for all of the signs strung up along the walk route, which volunteers had painted and walkers were in the process of constantly signing and drawing on. We wove in and out of other groups of walkers to grab cups of water and get stamps on our pamphlets at the checkpoint stations. We bounced our heads to the barbershop quintet, the yodelers, the classical string sextet, and the other musicians who were scattered along the road.

By mile seven, my muscles definitely wanted frequent stretching but the throbbing I was expecting didn’t appear. Three of us stumbled uphill forever through Newton, a stretch of about four miles that seemed to defy the laws of physics. [Oh my god, who designed Newton? It goes on forever. There is no respite. My personal hell has been discovered and it is the endless uphillness of Newton, Massachusetts. The laws of physics say no. It's like the entire state of Pennsylvania – sooner or later, you HAVE to go downhill! Physics says so! Not so in Pennsylvannia!! Not so in Newton!!!]

At the halfway-ish point (between 9.5 and 10 miles), one of my remaining teammates had to leave to go be in a wedding. Another who had slept past her alarm got a later start than the rest of the group and had been trying to catch up with us for the entire morning, so I made an executive decision to rest and wait for her before striking out again with my other teammate, whom I had met only three days before and for just long enough to exchange greetings and say, “Absolutely, you can walk with us!” When the truant found us, my sense of relief at having a familiar face to encourage me swelled. It immediately stuttered and failed when she informed me that she’d agreed to walk 10 miles and then return to the Boston Common to help out another coworker who was in charge of one of the volunteer tents.

It was the most demoralizing moment of the entire day.

I continued walking, more than somewhat awkwardly, with someone with whom I had only the barest of associations.  My social anxiety kept rearing its heinous head – there I was, in a crowd of thousands, doing something entirely alien to my usual existence, trying to remember if I’d put sunblock on my nose, wondering if I was making a terrible mistake in wearing the sneakers I’d bought five days beforehand, debating the merits of pausing and giving my feet time to swell while I wrapped my ankle in a bandage, trying to make small talk with someone I hardly knew, and the only thought I could really focus on was this stranger simply cannot be allowed to walk farther than me.

Mile 11.5 was the refueling stop. We sat and rested and ate freely provided sandwiches (read: a slice of American cheese, two slices of bread, cut in half, each half wrapped separately). We stretched, we stared at the sky, we thought about our options very, very carefully. He went home. I got up and continued to walk.

I can’t say what I expected to feel. I don’t remember my legs hurting terribly at that point, although I suspect that the pain receptors in my brain had been mostly overwritten by the euphoric haze of not bowing out before anyone else on my team, which was, frankly, an epic victory. It was at least another full mile before I realized that my left knee didn’t really want to straighten all the way, and hey, that kind of hurt. Another half mile or so down the road and I realized that I had blisters and they were speaking to me. I stopped, stretched, and decided to get to the next checkpoint before making any decisions.

As I passed the sign for Mile 14, the pain in my legs and feet went away completely. I realize now that this was probably a sign that my nervous system was shutting down in self-defense as my body reacted to the strain. I can still clearly hear the beats laid out by a drumming group near the checkpoint – with the pain out of the way, that thump-th-th-thump was free to invade and latch onto the section of my brain that was responsible for motor control.

I was a walking machine. With the new-found freedom and clarity of thought permitted by that fabulous drum line, I was able to finally lift my eyes up from the ground and take a look around. The crowd had thinned considerably but there was still a steady stream of moving bodies that stretched on into infinity in either direction. I was shocked and delighted to recognize a quartet of walkers I had noted with delight way back at the start line – Waldo, a giant chicken, Gumby, and a gorilla carrying a boombox. I drifted toward them in a completely nonchalant and totally noncreepy way and stuck as close to them as I could for the next couple of miles, letting the drums in my head change beat just enough to mesh with the Spanish techno radio station blaring from the gorilla’s stereo.

Feeling returned just before Mile 18.

Feeling sucks.

[[My true thoughts on the return of physical sensation at this interval have been redacted so that my mother will not yell at me. Feel free to fill in the blanks.]]

I realized that I was moving in a funny sort of duck waddle that rolled my weight around the acres of spongy, pain-laced blisters on my feet and kept my left knee locked in an unnatural curve. I forced myself to straighten my gait and ignored what I was sure was the feeling of blisters forming on my blisters. I lost the rhythm in my head and stared blindly ahead. I refused to let myself limp and I jerked my eyes back to the ground in front of my feet every time I realized that I was searching for the greenery of the Boston Common, which was impossibly far away, back on the other side of the Charles River.

Mile 19 marked the beginning of the Mass Ave bridge, euphoria, a premature feeling of accomplishment, and delirium. Delicious, delicious delirium. I knew I was grasping at shadows but the loss of the drumbeat had left me feeling bereft and I found myself directing an inordinate amount of brainpower to reworking the lyrics to “Doin’ It All for My Baby”:

Doin’ it all for my sehhhh-helf // ‘Cause I’m as fine as I can be! // Doin’ it all for my sehhh-helf // For everything I do for me!

I celebrated my conquest of the smoots by grinning like a madwoman at all the cars packed into the streets on the Boston side of the bridge. There were event volunteers stationed along the greenway of Commonwealth Avenue, volunteers who waved and cheered and handed out paper cups filled with orange quarters. I have to be honest – those were quite possibly the best oranges I have ever tasted in my entire life. They tasted of refreshment and victory.

I have walked the route from Kenmore Square to the Boston Common many, many times. Never have I been so fervently giddy while doing so! The ache in my knee was breathtaking and my feet hurt so badly that with every step I started watching for traces of blood squeezing out of my shoes, I was sunburned and exhausted to the point of tears. When I passed near a couple enjoying their oranges, I overheard the girl say, “Aren’t you glad we did this? I am so glad we did this!”

I couldn’t have agreed more.

I crossed the finish line onto the Boston Common, vision narrowed to focus on the tent housing the last checkpoint. The volunteer I stumbled up to grinned at me and offered a hearty, “You made it!” I grinned back, elated, as I collected my final checkpoint stamp and completion certificate. I stepped away and turned to survey the Common, thinking how nice it would be to have the energy to go join in the celebrations and activities still swarming the hill. I waved to an acquaintance at the tent my coworkers were managing but hobbled to the subway instead.

I was wearing the Walk for Hunger team shirt we’d designed, carrying a little sack filled with water bottles and extra socks, clutching my certificate to my chest and limping severely and I was surprised and thrilled at all of the encouraging smiles I received from other passengers and passersby. Even the bus driver in Somerville, a member of a breed of people who rarely offers anything other than scowls and scorn, grinned at me as he drove right up to the curb and lowered the bus carriage as if I were a grandmother.

When I finally reached my apartment, I had to crawl upstairs to my bedroom. The tears started coming as I gained the top landing and batted open my bedroom door. The hysterical laughter began as I leveraged myself into a hunched position and fell onto my bed. I lay there, gasping in pain and euphoria, tears streaming from my eyes, with one thought running through my mind: I did it!!

When I had gathered enough energy to wiggle around, I plugged my phone in to charge. I had had the brilliant idea of using an app to track my distance and the battery had given out just before the 11-mile mark. I booted it up to discover a flurry of text messages from family, friends and coworkers, all of which encouraged me on or congratulated me for pushing through to the end.

I called my mother. I don’t remember much of the conversation, except that there were laughter, congratulations and the ever-present tears involved. I’m sure there was also a fair amount of profanity on my part, because those are the only words I can think of, even now, to describe the both the physical agony and the emotional triumph I was experiencing. My mother, bless her, does not seem to have held my impropriety against me.

I spent the entire evening, up until the point I completely passed out, vacillating between tears and laughter in a prime demonstration of hysteria. At one point I slithered from my bed and dragged myself to the bathroom. This was true, visceral dragging. My legs refused to work even enough to allow a crawl. I have no memory of how I managed to get into the tub, although I suspect that it involved some blinding pain. I distinctly recall punching the surface of the water and shrieking, through my tears, “I did it! I walked 20 miles! I [[effing]] did it!!”

And I did. I walked 20 miles. I did it all on my own. I did it with my own thoughts, worries, fears and goals to accompany me. I did it without the distraction of an iPod, a podcast, or a conversation partner. I had no one to vent my complaints to, no one to tell me how tired they were, but I also had no one to urge me on.

Even now, several months later, I remember the sympathetic and amazed expressions I encountered at work the next day. No one, including myself, seemed to believe that I had managed to make it in. In fact, I had nearly missed the bus to the office but the driver caught sight of my rocking, inching hobble and mercifully stopped in the middle of a street to allow me to clamber on. Over the course of that day, the conversations I had about the walk did more to diminish my lingering physical pain than the copious amounts of ibuprofen I was consuming. Every congratulatory comment or sympathetic glance when I rubbed at an ache filled me with fiery joy.

A 20-mile walk? I did it because I could. Because I could. And no one can take that away from me. When my old inadequacies rear their heads, I find myself hitting back, rather than shrinking from my fears. I’m going to look silly walking down the street like this and people are going to laugh at me, the thoughts come. Then my victory crows, “This?! This is a body that has walked 20 miles! LET THEM LOOK!!”

I have a level of confidence, now, that I never would have imagined I was capable of. I’m likely to look at a challenge, whether physical or emotional, and decide that it’s no problem when compared to a 20-mile walk. I have endurance, determination and motivation, and I have proved such beyond any doubt. I was walking for a cause, to raise awareness of an issue that has, thankfully, never touched me, and I have been rewarded with more than a sense of compassion. The Walk for Hunger has fed my psyche as well as my desire to participate, in some little way, in my community. The walk devoured my doubts, my belief that I could never participate in a physical challenge. I’m still overweight, out of shape, asthmatic, and given to bouts of lethargy, but I no longer care so much how I measure up in comparison to other people on the street. I’d like to see them walk 20 miles!

Since the walk, life has brought its usual bevy of strife and disappointment, delight and fun. I’ve certainly had dark days of depression to contrast my periods of self-fulfillment and good cheer. The difference, now, is that when I falter and sulk and feel gloomy, I can look up at my bedroom wall to my framed Walk for Hunger display – my registration sticker, completion certificate, and checkpoint roster, which I bloody well framed – and remember that I can, in fact, do the impossible.

After all, it’s only impossible if you never try.

Starting saving up, folks. I’m going to do the Walk for Hunger again.

Shameless begging!

Hey guys! On Sunday, I will be walking 20 miles in Project Bread’s WALK FOR HUNGER. Please support me!

Learn more and donate!!

Gravecrawl.

One thing you should know about me, if you don’t already (as if there was anyone left in the world who didn’t know), is that I am an unrepentant nerd.

I have decided that one of my epic wins for SuperBetter will be participating in Project Bread’s Walk For Hunger. This is an annual event to raise money and aware to fight poverty and hunger in the greater Boston area. While it’s not necessary to walk the full circuit, I intend to. The “circuit” to which I am referring is a 20-mile loop from Boston Common along the southern portion of the Emerald Necklace out to the western suburbs past Boston College then back up across the Charles River and along the river’s northern shore through Cambridge before returning to the Common.

Did you catch that? I, Little Miss My-Bum-Never-Leaves-My-Desk-Chair, will be walking 20 miles on May 6th. I am doing this as a team effort with some of my coworkers – at the moment, there are only three of us signed up but we’re blackmailing recruiting others to join us. Speaking of which, please consider sponsoring me!

I am in training to be able to survive this venture with all my toes and ankles intact. To that end, I wandered out of my house this past Sunday with vague plans to “go for a walk.” I discovered a boardwalk along a tributary of the Mystic River which I’d had no idea existed (the boardwalk, that is, not the river) and spent a happy interval meandering from side to side of the path to admire the various leafless shrubs and mud. [I enjoy Mud Season greatly as it's the only time of the year I can be outside without feeling like I'm going to die by freezing to death, sunstroke or asthmatic asphyxiation.]

The boardwalk came to an end by an old graveyard. I’ve passed this graveyard several times before but I’ve always before been on my way to someplace. Last Sunday, however, I had Nowhere In Particular to be, so I gave into my base urges and fluttered across the street and down amongst the tombstones.

I am a pathological historian. Like any individual with an overactive imagination who has spent the majority of her years memorizing hieroglyphics, exchanging notes in class written in Latin, constructing sugar cube ziggurats, or wearing chainmaile headdresses (they’re called chaplets!) while doing homework, I have an inordinate fondness for dead people and an unending fascination with the people who arranged for the grave markers.

[My love of graveyards sometimes borders on obsession. Did you know that there is a tombstone in the graveyard in the Boston Common dedicated to a sixteen-year-old Chinese sailor who was buried at sea? His master erected the headstone as a memorial upon returning home to Boston. I have dreamed up multiple life stories for that young man and his obvious rapport with his captain. Fascinating!]

Anywho.

Did the rest of them move away?

There are definitely still some Trants in the area, then, festive ones!

Do these people never die? Or do they not believe in cognomens?

Given the spacing, there were two or three more members expected to join the plot. I wonder where they went to. Married? Enlisted? Transferred out of state?

Note the picture of Madonna and Child. It was taped on, extremely faded but looked like paper. I don't know that I'd believe it's been there longer than two years. But in an old part of the graveyard...

An entire society raised a stone for one member? How ponderous a name is Conference! Or was the entire group lost in an accident during a conference about St. Cecilia?

Italian immigrants, likely only in the area a few years. There were no other such tombstones. Where did the parents go after their loss?

Graveyards are so serene, so beautiful, and display so very many different tastes.

Graveyards are for the living. As are playgrounds. I can only imagine that the dead are comforted by the sounds of happy children and the peaceful strolls parents take around the mayhem.

There was clearly no consensus on Mary's birth year but I wonder about the theories. Was she elderly when she passed? Likely born between 1848 and 1889, given the placement. Did she marry into the family and no one knew her age?

For a moment I wondered if I was having a flashback to my 2001 trip to Ireland. Simply beautiful.

The artificial flower arrangement was not terribly faded though the date of departure fell in the 1980s. Have I met this relative who is focused on floral longevity? Did they choose an artificial display because they live far away and cannot come back often to refresh it?

Perpetual care tombstones are utterly baffling to me. I always have to double-check the dates.

Clearly a close-knit family, long in the area, determined to stay together. The obvious age differences in the stone are incredible, from the lichen and erosion around the patriarch's name to the depth and clarity of Francis and Mary, shows really fascinating details about changing stone carving norms. And see how John's death was later than that of Ellen? The carving shows his name was added when his wife's was. He didn't expect Ellen to pass before he did, possibly he didn't even expect her to be on this stone. An unmarried sister?

No caring family remain here to clear the encroaching dirt and grass. My fingertips were insufficient.

Dead trees, live birds, two families united as one.

Was this unique marker a family decision or an individual one? Does the family have an affinity for or connection to pink marble (which comes from Tennessee or Georgia)? It's been there long enough for the plate to oxidize but there are unfaded artificial flowers. When was the stone placed and how much did it cost in the currency of the time? Why unworked?

The trees bear row nameplates. The names are all Latin, all Popes.

Honestly, to me it looks kind of silly but I imagine that it would be a great help if I were looking for an ancestral plot in particular.

This crooked stone has rolled or been tipped upside down and likely tilted away from its rightful plot. The dirt around it shows it's been like that for some time. Maintenance of the graveyard must be limited and the family must not visit.

Aha, mystery solved. Vampires and/or zombies have clearly taken over the maintenance shed. This is obviously their way in and out of the pit basement of the little building.

What a delightful outing!!