“The Nuisance”

It's really amazing what you find when you clean--when you really clean--your apartment. And there is no better time to really get down to the nitty gritty of what you have stowed away in corners you didn't know existed than when you move. Honestly.

I am finding unopened packets of earplugs, single shoelaces, sample caffeine pills, half-written letters, scribbled story ideas, and other tidbits and scraps I've saved for who-knows-what reason. The most ironic thing is, after examination, I still cannot bear to part with most of it! Oh I see why I saved this, I will think, despite the fact that I clearly did not remember having saved it in the first place. This will come in so useful, should I find the time/want to ____. Right.

Some of these discoveries, though, feel like small treasures: little candies I am uncovering that, as I find them, I pop into my mouth and think, "Aha! this is what I taste like. I always knew I was a good judge of myself!" Below is one such example. It is a poem that back in . . . maybe eleventh grade? So 2002 or 2003, when I was participating in a poetry workshop on Saturdays at the Braddock Library. (This was back when I fancied myself an "all-around" writer, which obviously had to include poetry. I have since absolved myself of that delusion.)

I have never been one to particularly enjoy reading poetry. It always feels to me like the poets are trying too hard, and I prefer narratives to overwrought existentialism or over-described scenery. However, poetry does demonstrate that a few well chosen words can, at times, replace entire paragraphs to convey what you mean, and this is a skill that, as a writer, you should both covet and cultivate as best you can.

I like this whole poem, as a whole, but also in parts. I think it can be read both ways, because each stanza conveys a slightly different tone, a slightly different message. I'm not going to go into the whole English Major Analysis mode here, but I'll just say that the last three lines of this poem are brilliant. Read quickly, you can almost miss what makes them so unusual. When I first read them, they made me think of a dog carrying around his pup by the scruff of the neck, with the pup being the "love," but then that not being enough to fill the dog's mouth. But then I realized that it was that word "like" that had crept past me--I had just assumed the line had read something like, "Around in my teeth." But no, it was "Around with me like teeth." Love for someone is like teeth? And to follow it with the line, "And I am starving," implies hunger for love, but also the act of destruction, because teeth chew, and envisioning "chewing" love.... Well, you get the picture. Hence why this woman does not envision herself to be the ideal lover.

In any event, an excellent poem. Packing is certainly no fun, but at least it leads me to discoveries like this!

"The Nuisance"
by Marge Piercy
Circles on the Water. New York: Alfred A Knopf, Inc, 1982.

I am an inconvenient woman.
I’d be more useful as a pencil sharpener or a cash register.
I do not love you the way I love Mother Jones or the surf
Coming in
Or my pussycats or a good piece of steak.
I love the sun prickly on the black stubble of your cheek.
I love you wandering floppy making scarecrows of despair.
I love you when you are discussing changes in the class structure
And it jams my ears and burns in the tips of my fingers.

I am an inconvenient woman.
You might trade me in on a sheepdog or a llama.
You might trade me in for a yak.
They are faithful and demand only straw.
They make good overcoats.
They never call you up on the telephone.

I love you with my arms and my legs
And my brains and my cunt and my unseemly history.
I want to tell you about when I was ten and it thundered.
I want you to kiss the crosshatched remains of my burn.
I want to read you poems about drowning myself
Laid like eggs without shells at fifteen under Shelly’s wings.
I want you to read my old loverletters.

I want you to want me
As directly and simply and variously
As a cup of hot coffee.
I want to, to have to, to miss what can’t have room to happen.
I carry my love for you
Around with me like teeth
And I am starving.

Picking Up the Pace

So I guess this would be Epic Long Run # . . . 4? If you count the Christmas Eve run as #3. I suppose the distance could make this run epic, although I have run 20 miles before, when I was training for the Pittsburgh. The weather could be considered epic to some, although a 25-feels-like-12°F was not nearly as bad as what I suffered during some of my earlier runs, particularly that 19°F 14-miler. No, what made this run “epic” was the pace.

Lately—over the past three weeks or so—I’ve been having severe pacing problems. This is not to say I’ve felt particularly tired or miserable while running (although running in Pittsburgh really does make me think twice about whether I love the sport or not, because running constant hills requires way too much attention to pain); I’ve simply gotten to the end of my run, looked at my watch, and done a double-take. I was running that slowly?! How could I have possibly run 26.2 miles at a 7:40 pace if I can’t even run 4 miles under 8:15? Truly, I was averaging between 8:00 and 8:30, and as the time crept up, my morale tumbled downward.

The more I tried to rationalize my escalating times, the more frustrated I became. Over break, I was sleeping more than usual, so it couldn’t be from fatigue. Also over break I was eating on a very regular schedule—as opposed to my sometimes abnormal volleyball/swimming/running/shopping/ “NYC life” influenced schedule that can have me eating dinner at 9 or 10 at night—so it couldn’t be my metabolism that was bringing my legs to a screeching halt. I tried stretching before I ran; I tried not stretching before I ran. Nothing seemed to help—I felt exactly the same when I ran, except I was still running 30 seconds slower per mile than I usually would. Apparently my body was just going to run slowly, and that was that.

After holiday break, when I returned to work and started running with my buddies there, things seemed the same. They had all stopped running over break for their various reasons: one had had surgery, another was busy taking care of his newborn. Consequently, they all needed to build back up their pace and distance and gladly matched my new slower pace.

Then, this past Friday , M___, T___, and I ran the Palisade 5 route. By some miracle, we ran under 40 minutes. I, honestly, was shocked. That was the first time in three weeks that I had run any distance in under 8 min/mile. I was dying to know why, but I had no explanation, so I just let it go, hoping that it would somehow carry over and give me at least something under 8:30/mile the next day for my 20 mile run.

Did it ever! I ran 20 miles in—excluding the 5 minute water break I took at the top of Riverside Park—exactly 2:30:25. And because I personally am terrible at math, I will tell you: that come out to a little over 7:30/mile!

Snapshot Book Review: The Year of the Flood

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It's unfortunate that this novel feels so gimmicky, because I very much enjoyed Atwood's earlier and "similar" novel Oryx and Crake. This one feels somewhat like an attempt to expand upon the ruined and dystopian world presented in that earlier novel, and the effort was well directed, because that is a very fascinating and creative world. However, for whatever reason, we gradually lose our ability to relate to the characters as the book progresses. Perhaps this is because the details of the strange world's demise get to be too much--they get in the way of the story of the characters, and because we care less about what happens to those characters, we care less about the story at all. Or maybe it is the fact that every chapter starts with a very impersonal "bible verse" of sorts, from Adam One, offering an edict for how The Gardeners should celebrate that particular holy day. Whatever the reason, I barreled through to the end of the novel, only to wish I had stopped halfway, when I really was still enjoying it.

My favorite stories were of Ren, the pole dancer the (quite literal) club Scales and Tails, and her friend Amanda. Atwood couldn't seem to decide, however, until nearly the middle of the book whether their story was to be central to the novel. Then, when it was deemed critical, it had to compete with that of Toby, the burger-flipper-turned-beekeeper, whose story should have seemed interesting but who, as a character, was so reserved and unemotional that she actually was uninteresting.

On a side note, I also must add that I would love to see an entire novel dedicated to Painball: a punishment given for crimes in which the offenders are put into an arena armed with horrendous weapons and "sides" (black or red teams, I believe) and told to kill the people on the other team. This, I think, is prime material for another novel.

Lastly, having now read The Year of the Flood, I would love to go back and reread Oryx and Crake, specifically because of the overlap in who Jimmy/Snowman is in The Year of the Flood. Wouldn't it be wonderful of a teacher of professor somewhere used these books for to teach something about literary continuity? Or as a part of a dystopian literature course? If nothing else, we must give Atwood credit for that: she definitely planned out this novel with admirable thoroughness. Hats off for creativity and attention to detail.

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Snapshot Book Review: The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book gets five stars not because it is a fabulous literary rendering of a superbly thought-out, emotionally complex story, not because it delves deeply into the interwoven psyches of several nuanced yet humane and relatable characters, but because, very simply, it is the latest book to keep me up past midnight in an all-night-trying-to-finish-it marathon. I got into it that much.

Essentially, Suzanne Collins is writing Margaret Atwood material for teenagers, and she is writing it well. The Hunger Games combines the best plot points and overall social commentaries of Orwell's 1984, Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, and Lowry's The Giver, while adding her own, more modern-seeming intensity to the mix. Something about the pace of the novel reminded me K.A. Applegate's Animorphs series, and particularly the knowledge that it was the first of a trilogy.

In short, while the book was clearly meant as young adult fiction, I still enjoyed it very much. The love triangle was passe but not overwrought, and if I were still 12 or 14, I would have bought it hook line and sinker. The fight scenes were very thoroughly depicted although not in too much detail as to slow the pace and lose the reader, and Katniss' internal turmoil over her loyalties toward herself, her allies, and even her enemies in the arena I was convincingly portrayed.

I was very pleased to find that the novel stood well on its own. It is the mark of an accomplished writer to be able to finish a novel that intentionally leaves space for continuation without leaving the first story incomplete. I am very much looking forward to reading the next book in the trilogy: Catching Fire.

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Moving Furniture: A Practical Riddle

For all of you math gurus out there, help me out: If you have a bed that is 6’10” tall, 4’10” wide, and 14” high, can it fit through a 6’7” tall, 2’5” wide doorway?

I know the solution should have something to do with a diagonal created by tilting the bed in the doorway, so that means we need to create two imaginary triangles out of the rectangle made by the doorway. (The diagonal, if I remember correctly from 8th grade geometry, is called the hypotenuse.) To do all of this, I guess we first have to convert everything to inches, so let's do that:

bed length = 82"

bed width = 58"

bed height = 14"

doorway height = 79"

doorway width = 29"

Okay, so now we have the equation a² + b² = c², with c² being the hypotenuse. (Pythagorean's theorem, if I am actually brushing the correct cobwebs off of these dusty old mathematical memories.) a = doorway height, b = doorway width (i.e. the floor, or the base of this triangle), and c = the imaginary diagonal that will, hopefully, be longer than the bed length.

√(6241 + 841)=84.15

Whew! So, if the diagonal is ~84" long, and the bed is 82" long, it will fit!

But wait.... Couldn't we have just turned the bed on its side--so that the width was essentially the length--and gotten it out the doorway like that?

Well, this was a fun mathematical exercise, nonetheless. Nothing like proving those 8th grade math skills were meant to come in handy after all!