Dry Creek

Dry Creek might be the best place to run in the entire world even though it's not currently very dry. Starting at the JCC you climb and climb until you come out on the shoreline trail with a view of the entire valley from the Great Salt Lake to Mount Olympus. I run it at least once a week.

A couple of days ago I took my older sister up there (she lives in Wisconsin but she didn't let the altitude slow her down at all--tough as nails). As were on our way back down she asked me if I was training for anything. "This," I said.

Square one can be a scary place to be. Sometimes it's exciting because you don't know where you're going to end up. But square one in dating is usually not a great place. I can think of two reasons, one is that being at square one often means that you just ended some type of relationship. I've learned that even in the worst relationships there are good things--and after they end the good things tend to be more present (is the grass really greener on this side?). The other reason is that with every return to singleness you are older than before. Sometimes it feels like a never ending game of chutes and ladders that you've been playing for 6 hours and it's two in the morning and all you want to do is go to sleep.

I feel like I should clarify that this little bit of randomness does not come from recent events in my life--I didn't recently end a relationship, but it's something that I think of sometimes because if square one were a state I could probably establish residency and get in-state tuition.
It also comes from the fact that I feel bad to be the owner of a blog that is so neglected. I had to write about something. And I'm coming to the conclusion that writing about all the books I've read recently could get really old really fast. Thanks to those of you who still read.

Writing (blogging) is like eating carrots: sometimes you want to and sometimes you don't.

My generation

Yesterday I was out for a run when I passed a guy who looked like this:

He was nice (said 'hi') but I didn't trust him.

A fashion tip: my generation collectively imagines that Hitler's closet was full of clothes exactly like this.

You know you're in over your head...

When your desktop looks like this:
Sometimes there just aren't enough hours in the day.

The saddest book of all time

I just finished “Where the Red Fern Grows;” if you’ve read it before* then you may already know how this story is going to end.

A few days ago I was listening in as my mom and my sister were sorting through the “children’s” section of our books to send some off to the D.I. Afraid that they would throw away “Sideways Stories from Wayside School,” I decided to watch closely. As I did, the old rust-colored hardbound copy of “Where the Red Fern Grows” caught my eye. I had a flashback of driving to California 15 or 20 years ago, my whole family in the Suburban as my parents tried to read the last few pages in between sobs and nose-blows. I picked it off the shelf. “If you don’t cry when you read that then you don’t have a heart,” my mom said.

This put me in a tough position because I didn’t want to end up crying, but the thought of being heartless didn’t sound very good either. Lose-lose situation, right? So I was careful as I started to read. The book was written for teenagers, so how sad could it really be? My strategy was to not start caring for any of the characters—especially not the dogs. And as a backup plan, I read the whole thing with a very critical eye just to make sure I didn’t get too wrapped up in it. Then maybe I would be a little choked up or kind of sad, but not in tears—proving that I am too manly to cry but that I’m not totally machine.

I did really well until the very end. I won’t explain all the details (just in case someone is reading this who hasn’t read the book), but somewhere around the line: “You were worth it, old friend, and a thousand times over,” I lost it. I tried to focus on the fact that he was using words like “old friend” or “a thousand times over,” but it didn’t matter. I was bawling my eyes out. Turns out I do have a heart (which is kind of a relief, I guess), and I’ll agree with my mom—if you can finish this book dry-eyed then you are a heartless beast.

*Turns out everyone I’ve talked to since I’ve read it has seen the movie, but nobody has actually picked up the book. Is it worth reading? A few hours after I finished the book my mom and I both started crying just talking about it—it’s absolutely worth reading.

What it's like being a music snob

One of my rules for keeping a blog is no writing about dating. The tricky thing about this is that most of the interesting stuff that happens to me is in that area of life. But it’s tough to write an interesting blog post about a funny date without making somebody look bad. Here I’m breaking my rule, but only because the only person who looks bad in the story is me.

A couple of months ago I went on an unsuccessful set-up. A couple of days after the date one of my friends was asking me why I had decided it was not going to work. I was having a hard time finding the best way to explain to him that I thought we were just too different in too many ways. He still looked confused so I picked an example:

Me: Like, she didn’t know who Mendelssohn was.

Jake: Who?

Me: Felix Mendelssohn…

Jake: Yeah, I have no idea who that is.

Me: Really? He’s like one of the top twenty classical composers of all time.

I should clarify that I don’t normally talk about classical composers on dates (not even top 20 classical composers), but we were at a choir concert and one of the pieces was by Mendelssohn.

I wasn’t too surprised that Jake wasn’t familiar with him; I just assumed that he didn’t know his classical composers very well. No big deal. Then I decided to take a poll from the rest of the table (like 6 or 7 dudes and one girl).

Me: Hey guys, do you know who Mendelssohn is?

Everyone: No idea.

Me: Really? Randy, you know who he is, right? (Randy is a really talented pianist)

Randy: Dude, I don’t know anything about football players.

Me: Felix Mendelssohn…

Randy:

Me: He’s a classical composer…

Randy: Oh, yeah I thought you were talking about football.

So while I had been wondering what planet the girl who didn’t know about some random music history was from, I was the one from a different planet—the planet of musical snobbery.