Archive for July, 2009

Usually, when this happens, it is because of an outside force meeting the immovable object that is my self-esteem and my inability to truly believe, over long periods of time and through swamps and over hills and down into valleys and in ditches, that I have good qualities. The story goes how I was feeling fat/ugly/weird-looking/zitty/strange/dumb, but someone looked at me and said Wonderful Thing about my Beauty, either Inner, Outer, or Both, and I had an epiphany about my true, excellent self, and I felt that this was a real turning point for the way I feel about myself and the way I carry my little pea brain around inside my pointy head.

And it’s a magical story full of wonder, and you want to cheer about how beautiful it is to truly understand and have faith your goodness and your expression of that goodness in the world and how sometimes, when someone sees something in you, it is the most meaningful connection you will ever experience with a human being outside of one you have either just birthed or who has given you a pony.

A few weeks ago, as I do, I started running again. The Couch to 5K, that old reliable standby which removes your buttocks from the couch and sets you bouncing and cursing down the road towards ultimate health and total fitness, or at least the ability to run for 3 miles without passing out and then dying in a ditch and then being eaten by wild moose who have trampled down off the mountains when they heard that there was a buffet.

Jennette was my inspiration—she announced, I am going train for the 5K! Oh boy, that was totally easy! she said. And I thought, holy crap, it’s totally easy! I can do it too! And then I might have totally blamed her for leading me astray when, after rising bright and early for a vigorous dawn run, I staggered home and crawled into bed, safely out of range of mooses, and pretty much slept like the biggest Wuss in Wusstown, population me,  for the rest of the day.