Blink

If you haven't read anything by Malcolm Gladwell make this book your first, and then follow it with The Tipping Point.  I'm about to straight up recommend this book like it's my job because I think I'm in love! The sociologist/part that's fascinated by human behavior in me was practically salivating at just the description alone, and now that I'm done with it I can honestly say that the insights and anecdotal evidence from this book are truly stupendous.  It's all about how sometimes we can just know things intrinsically without being able to explain why and how these snap judgments, though made on an unconscious level, can be easily swayed by too much information.  Things like how a college students best friends will do worse on a personality test than complete strangers who only got to spend ten minutes in their dorm room before taking the test!  He talks about stuff like thin-slicing which is what he describes as the unconscious process we go through everytime we meet a new person or have to evaluate a situation quickly.  Ever wonder why it is that we can just tell when we won't get along with someone or if we should trust them or not?  Well, apparently our subconcious is making these judgments based upon cues we couldn't describe if asked long before we even realize it!  I could go on and on about the examples from this book, but I won't spoil it for anyone who now plans on reading it, which I highly suggest if you haven't picked that up by now... On an unrelated note, I went to a concert put on by the Woodland Foundation which is a camp for kids and adults with mental and physical disabilities which I found out about through one of my best friends who works there and let me tell you, not only could some of them play the violin way better than I ever could, but I thought everyone involved was really courageous for doing something I know I couldn't do.  It was incredibly inspiring and humbling which was an excellent reminder to me that no matter how much of a bummer things are sometimes perspective is key and life is about finding that perspective and using it to your advantage.  So if my friend is reading this I have to say I'm blown away by what you're doing and incredibly proud of you!
Have a RUN-believable day!
Song Suggestion: You, Me, and the Bourgeoisie by the Submarines
Post-Script (Because I hate writing P.S. like this is some middle-school love note): Sorry about the lack of pictures, my computer and Blogger have been at odds with each other lately and until they make-up I'm afraid my posts will continue to be drab and colorless; curse you technology!

Association

Can I first just say that I love playing that word association game with people where they have to say the first thing that comes to mind when you say a word.  But that's not what this post is about.  This post is about how absolutley incredible it is that our mind automatically associates certain things with sounds, smells, tastes, touches, any sense you name it we associate things with it!  Sometimes I hear a song and I'm suddenly itching to go running, or start crying, or think about that time on my Senior Trip... nevermind about that, but it transports us to that time, just for a moment, and we can easily recall the most minute details.  A bunch of stuff does that for me, movies will remind me of a particular person I saw them with, food especially can make me recall memories I had put to the back of my mind.  I'm always fascinated by how startlingly easy it is to recall this stuff with a simple whiff or glimpse of something.  Maybe it's just the way our brains are hard-wired to code information, we are inclined to synthesize information to relate to something we previously learned so I guess it makes a lot of sense, but still it's crazy how we can associate seemingly random memories together!  Sometimes I don't even get a full memory or anything like that, it's just a feeling that I can't shake.  Regardless, I love the random spurts of association I have throughout the day, they make me feel more connected to people I'm missing or haven't seen in a while as well as my own life and the events happening in it.  Completely unrelated, but today someone got marshmallow fluff in my hair at work and two people in particular know exactly what I'm talking about when I say that there are two things I absolutely cannot stand: sweat and getting sticky things like marshmallow in my hair!  Running today was an exersize in endurance both physically and mentally because all I wanted to do was shower away the sweat and the marshmallow; I guess if anything I learned that a little marshmallow in your hair never killed anyone so deal with it kid!  I just realized that I use that phrase a lot, "it never killed anyone" and I figure it just means that I like to think if it can't kill me then why not which isn't a super cautious way to approach things, but being cautious is so overrated anyways.  Sorry that this got super rambly (pretty sure that's not a word) my mind was just all over the place on my run today.
Have a RUN-believable day!
Song Suggestion: For You by WolfRider (Any song that has whistling in it is ok in my book!)

Language

Words are a glorious thing.  They are truly our only inexhaustible resource and in a world where resources are scarce to come by this is a valuable quality.  They can convey so much without changing at all and it baffles me how much meaning we can put behind even four letter when combined the right way!  I know that I don't have a passion for languages, I'll never have the desire to speak fluent german (even though some of the words are just plain hilarious to say) but I am passionate about the english language.  It's not just speaking it, though I do love to talk, it's the power behind something that without all else wouldn't exist.  Side-note: Do you ever have conversations with people in your head before approaching them, but by the time you actually have the conversation you're so exhausted from the one in your head that it doesn't turn out at all like you planned, happens to me all the time!  But I digress, words are everything, think about it, they can be an escape or a wake-up call, a comfort or a cruelty, a contradiction or a harmony, they're just strikingly vast that I can't wrap my head around it!  I had a teacher in High School who once said that she hates it when people say things like words are failing them or there aren't proper words to describe something because it's not that the words don't exist, it's that we aren't putting forth the effort to find the right ones.  I completely agree and I think sometimes it's easy to fall back on old standards or what's expected rather than taking the time to figure out what exactly it is we want to say.  "Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves." Joseph Addison knew what he was saying and from now on I'm going to be less careless about my choice of words and less cautious about saying them!
Have a RUN-believable day!

 

Grounded

It's been a while since I've posted and if anything I've discovered that not expressing my thoughts often enough leads to some really unhealthy results so writing out what I'm thinking about in such an anonymous and detached way is a lot more beneficial than even I realized! Today's post is really a culmination of a bunch of recent events that individually would already be overwhelming, but together have made for a pretty rough couple of weeks.  Do you ever have those moments where you find yourself grounded to reality whether you like it or not?  Like all you want to do is suspend realism for just a little while and lose yourself in the imaginary because it's soo much better than your present, but you can't because deep down you know that eventually you'll have to deal with the consequences.  If you understand what I'm talking about then congratulations you're human and have the unfortunate luck of dealing with the constant battle between the logical and the emotional that everyone faces.  I've done a fairly decent job so far this summer of balancing the abstract imaginary world of my desires and my future and my idealism with the concrete world of the present and reality.  However, my perfect balance was ripped apart and now I'm grounded in a reality that, as much as I would love to leave it behind, is too important to forsake.  One of those things is my grandfather passing away at 2 am this morning.  While my relationship with him was not a strong one it still pains me to know that someone who shares my last name and part of my past is no longer with us, more importantly, I hurt for people I know who are more affected than I am.  Yet, what hits me the most is the harsh reality that time is not a part of that imaginary abstract ideal, but rather a concrete and tangible entity.  Time has a beginning and an end for all of us which is horribly morbid and that epiphany almost caused me to run straight into a mailbox this morning, but the truth is that the only thing that can truly outlast time is the past not the future.  Our legacy. Our friendships. Our work. Our influence. Those things that we have done live on.  I think it really boils down to the fact that we live in our future, but we die in our past.  This really grounded me to reality and the reality that I shouldn't wait to say things to people who need to hear them or do things I need to do; I have to make them a part of my past as soon as possible before I no longer have the opportunity.  Then I found out that my dog, the only living being that truly appreciates my rapier wit and sparkling personality (insert sarcastic tone here), has to have surgery which makes the part of me that wants to do everything in my power to help in any way I can feel hopelessly lost because, as much as I wish I could, I do not have the skills to perform surgery and make her better.  Then, another thing that happened was that after almost two months of blissful denial on my end I had a breakdown at a campsite in the Middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania surrounded by motorcyclists and insects intent on making my life an itching hell (On a positive note the actual camping aspect was super rewarding and made me feel incredibly accomplished even if there were showers nearby...).  I'm not sure what exactly triggered it, now that I think about it though it was probably the country music because seriously that would drive anyone to the edge, but I couldn't run away from reality anymore.  I was informed that I'm a difficult person to get to know, which surprised me because I pride myself on being pretty open and to the point with people rather than ambiguous or closed off, but it made me see that relying on people is necessary if you expect them to rely on you.  So while breaking down like that made jumping into the susquehanna river, toxic substances and all, look particularly inviting it was probably necessary.  It just means that I can't go back to the imaginary world I had stored so much of that part of me anymore, I have to stay grounded in reality a little longer and work to find a new balance with new information to incorporate.  And maybe every once in a while not force myself to be okay with things for everyone else's sake and just accept that sometimes in that battle of wills I mentioned above even the emotional side can surprise attack behind enemy lines in an effort to scatter logic's forces and succeed.  When you're at war with yourself reality is hard to avoid and with nowhere to turn taking a breath and regrouping is your only option so that's what this post is about.  Regrouping and remembering that reality is not something to run from just because it brings us extreme sadness sometimes, it's something to cherish because on the other end of that spectrum is extreme happiness.  Serge Daney a french cinema critic wrote once, "In an age of synthetic images and synthetic emotions, the chances of an accidental encounter with reality are remote indeed".  These encounters are painful, but they're purposeful too and they can be beneficial to us all if we choose to see them as reminders that reality has such wealth to offer us if we choose to come down from the clouds.  Sorry if this wasn't as light-hearted or random as my other posts I just couldn't find it in me to be very humorous today, but tomorrow can always be another story and another run.
Have a RUN-believable day!   

Belonging/Community/Every Other Self-Help Title Ever

There's got to be a list out there of all the things people intrinsically want as humans because I keep noticing more and more how universal a lot of emotions we experience on a regular basis are.  Wanting to belong is just one of them that I've been thinking about lately.  I think on some level we all want to belong to something or some group because belonging to a community is a large part of cultivating an identity for ourselves.  I read an article in my Social Aspects of Sexuality class that discussed the tenuous nature of communitites and how they erect these imaginary boundaries to help define the group and the individuals in it.  The vast amount of imaginary communities out there is overwhelming which is good for all of us because the odds are in our favor that we'll find one we fit in with, if this we're the Hunger Games of social acclimation we would totally be winning! (Nerd Alert! I couldn't help it I just couldn't stop thinking of "May the odds be ever in your favor") That aside, sometimes it's difficult to pick the 'right' group and I put right in quotations because I think it's a little obtuse for any one person to claim what is right or wrong for anyone else.  I'm just saying that with so many options people have to try on different communities, different identities, to find what fits best and often we mess up.  I certainly have, the number of times I tried to force something just because I thought it would look nice on my resume is a number even I'm ashamed of, but in the end I started to shed some of this imaginary weight to find what Anna Quindlen calls "your authentic self".  This notion is particularly intriguing to me because I truly believe that we go through a whole bunch of "selves" before we find our authentic one.  The problem with associating too much of our own identity with that of a community means that we become dependent on both the strongholds of that community as well as its boundaries.  People are complex, man oh man are we complex, and limiting ourselves like that is just plain dumb! I'm headed back to Wisconsin this weekend, shout-out to the Midwest raise all the roof's on all the houses, and I started to wonder if who I am today still aligns with the Midwestern values I was raised in?  Should I start feeling more of a sense of belonging with the East coast now?  I discovered that I can't shake my Midwestern background, nor do I want to, and I can't stop myself from finding who my authentic self is in this Eastern climate.  So I won't.  Every community I'm a part of, abstract or concrete, has shaped me and will continue to do so, but as long as I allow myself to think about who I am inside this whole machine they won't control my authentic self.  If you feel like you don't belong, surprise yourself, look a little deeper or search a little harder because I guarantee that someone, somewhere, would love to start an imaginary community with you! You can form the world's smallest cult (Joke! That was a joke I do not support cult activity!) or a two-person traveling circus whatever your interests are.  I won't be running in Wisconsin - gasp - so I won't be updating for a while, but while I'm eating cheese curds in the great state of the Green Bay Packers I'll be hoping everyone has a RUN-believable day!

Happiness

Tomorrow I'll write more I promise, but today it's going to be short, simple, and too the point!  Everything is going to be okay!  Oprah tells us to think of three positive things in our lives every morning to start our day off right and while Oprah has to have reached some sort of God-complex by now the thought isn't a bad one.  Today I had the strangest feeling that my life is really good and it just kept getting stronger.  Strange not because I haven't had a good life before this, but strange becasue lately everything just feels like an uphill battle for me.  Anything from family issues to personal issues has been on my back and being optimistic was a goal I had to set for myself, but today I woke up optimistic and didn't have to try to maintian it at all.  Progress! My life is really good, I have hilarious and incredible friends who go out of their way to visit me at work all the time, grandparents who continue to amaze me, a dog who still loves me even though I smother her to death, and a lot to look forward to.  I read that Type-A personalities are always thinking about what's next while they're doing what they have to do now which makes it extremely difficult to give either the attention it deserves.  Sometimes we have to stop everything and be decisive about what the present should be because who knows if tomorrow will be as good as today; for today getting a visit at work before going to play some sand volleyball, which is a crime against humanity that they let me play volleyball because I am far too clumsy for that sport, and eating peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon is more than enough to make me happy.  If anyone reads this, feel free to comment below with whatever made you happy today, anonymously or not! 
Have a RUN-believable day!

She seriously needs to just go buy her own island and start a cult or something before she takes over the entire world!
Song Suggestion: Breeze Blocks by Alt J

People Who Need People

Points to anyone who recognizes the title (or an imaginary cupcake because who wouldn't prefer that)!  A little while ago I had a discussion with my friend about how crazy it is to think that we see so many people everyday and yet never really take the time to actually notice them.  This all started because my friend saw me driving home from the library and we wondered how many times in the past we had passed each other and never knew it before becoming friends.  This topic is one of many that keep me up at night.  After the conversation I didn't really seriously consider it again until I read a quote from an author I actually think I hate a little bit, I know hate is a strong word but literature inspires strong emotions okay, by the name of John Steinbeck who wrote, "I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen".  Then last night at a baseball game my friends and I were stuck for about an hour in the parking lot where we ended up having a conversation with a bunch of guys tailgating right next to us.  Complete strangers that I otherwise would never have noticed and I'll probably never see any of them again, but at least if I do I'll know that I'm seeing them.  That's what is actually so hard for me to grasp about all of this is that I wish there was a way we could recognize when someone we pass will be important to us later on in life.  Like some sort of signal or maybe a gut feeling you get when you pass someone that says "Hey, you should stop and introduce yourself because you'll be seeing them again in the future".  I know it's ludicrous to try and actually see everyone you pass in a day I just can't help but feel like we waste so much time with people who are important to us by not being aware of their importance earlier.  There's nothing I can do about it and I ought to just let it go, but today on my run I slowed down every time I passed someone and tried to really notice them just in case.  All of my neighbors now think I'm either crazy or was raised in some progressive new-age household where parents don't teach their children manners or that it's not polite to stare (I assure you my household was anything but new-age) but at least I'll recognize them if we cross paths again.  We can't predict the future, unfortunately, but we can make the effort to see people now while we have the chance. 
Update: That whole positive thinking spiel, TOTALLY WORKS! I tried it at work the past couple of days and made more tips than ever before, thank you positivity for funding my obsession with cherry peel-apart twizzlers and hard-cover books.
Have a RUN-believable day!
Song Suggestion: Are You Free - Jhameel

For those of you who didn't receive the free cupcake above I'll let you off the hook with this one, here's a hint!

The Power of Positive Thinking

"You don't have the luxury of negative thought".  I never considered negativity a luxury before, but after reading Christina Applegate's section of Katie Couric's book The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons from Extraordinary Lives where she really does not have the luxury of thinking negatively in her life it kind of makes sense.  Here's a woman who has battled her way through physical trauma, both visible and not, throughout her whole career and she attributes a lot of her recovery to positive thinking.  In fact to quote her directly "this shit works!"  I started reading Katie Couric's book because I'm fascinated by quotes and my book of quotes was looking a bit thin so where else to turn but a book that claims to hold the BEST advice?  Oddly enough and completely unrelated one of the sections has someone stating that you really shouldn't take other people's advice... contradictory much.  Anyways, this book is full of great anecdotes and life lessons if anyone's interested, but mainly this passage got me thinking about the power of positive thinking.  Christina Applegate claims it helped her heal a broken bone faster than doctors thought possible and while I don't have any evidence quite as convincing as that to share I agree that positive thinking can go a long way.  I tried it out on my run today and the results were pleasantly affirmative.  Every time I started to feel like I was slowing down and started thinking negatively about myself and running I made myself smile.  I also made myself think about the outcome I wanted from this run and what I had to look forward to afterwards which seemed to make things more than bearable.  In turn I ended up running longer than expected and forming some very strong thoughts about positivity.  Negativity is a luxury because when it comes down to it if we're able to have negative thoughts that means that we have something good in our lives to lose.  People who actually have cause to be negative don't waste time on those thoughts, they have real problems to deal with whereas those of us with a lot of positives in our lives take these negative thoughts for granted because that's all they are, just thoughts.  I'm lucky to have this luxury and it's about time that I stop taking it so much for granted.  Mission: PositiveThinking is underway... dun dun. dun dun. dun dun. dun dun. dadada. dadada... that's the mission impossible theme song by the way (nerd alert!) Basically, in my everyday dealings I'm going to try and think of the positives above all else and keep a smile on my face while I do it.  Also because I've never known anyone to look good while they're scowling which I'm doubly sure applies to me as well!
Have a RUN-believable day!
Song Suggestion:  Light Falsetto Music - The Hood Internet

Relationships

Setting aside my feminist rant concerning relationships and the social evolution behind masculine and feminine roles I just want to start by saying that I am about as far from being an expert on relationships as one can get.  Therefore, anything I say in this post can be taken with about a kilogram of salt!  However, I do know what it feels like to fall for someone and not have it returned.  I also know what it's like to be that person to not return someone else's feelings and let me tell you that at both ends of the spectrum you are royally screwed.  I believe that it is human nature to avoid pain or being the cause of it.  We have so many tactics to prevent these things from happening on a daily basis and being cynical is one of them.  It's much easier to look at something and stand against it rather than pour ourselves into it and have the chance of getting hurt by it in the end.  I've always been cynical about relationships, but recently I had a conversation with a very close friend of mine who made me look like a freaking hopeless romantic!  That is a very difficult thing to do i.e. I laugh at both the Titanic and the Notebook.  But she, and she knows who she is, has the impression that relationships and in particular dating is a waste of time.  Recently she wrote about this conversation and how she couldn't express it at the time, but she's really less of a cynic than she portrays and more of a, wait for it, human being!  To her expressly, everything you said is not eccentric or unjustified in any way.  Being in a relationship is all about vulnerability; I believe that there is absolutely no possible way to remain completely in control in a relationship.  We relinquish the control we have over our emotions for control over theirs.  This all sounds a little matrix-y but all I mean is that to be in a healthy relationship is to trade the parts of you that you want them to know intimately for the parts of them you love.  Love is an all-consuming kind of emotion that doesn't work if you try to have it in moderation.  Love is not for restraint or for protection it's for losing who we are and finding it again in all of the things we like in that person only to realize that the whole time we thought we had lost it they we're holding on to it for us.  If they won't have the patience to hold onto us while we tread water in the beginning then it won't work.  However, I had a conversation with some people last night about how obsessive love can get and how this exchange can go wrong if instead of holding onto who we are for us that other person absorbs it until both people are changed, but not for the better.  Basically love, like practically everything else in this world, lives only in the extremes.  But honestly who wants a love of indifference?  "Oh yeah we've been together for 2 years because we like each other just fine..." said no one ever!  The trick to this whole spiel is finding that person and here I will not compromise when I say that just as everything happens for a reason, everyone happens for a reason!  I firmly believe that there is someone out there for everyone and even if it takes those two people 80 years to become ready to meet each other once they are it'll be inevitable.  Now that I've lost all credibility as a cynic I'll end with one of my favorite quotes from Maya Angelou who once wrote
"The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them"
Take that how you will on this gloriously work-free summer saturday and have a RUN-believable day!

Song Suggestion: I Already Forgot Everything You Said by The Dig