LOVE/hate

Have you seen this commercial?

I love the New Balance LOVE/hate commericals. I like the cleverness of describing running as a relationship, and it is an extremely apt description.

In November of 2007, I started training for the Gary Bjorklund half marathon. It seemed like an impossibly distant goal, I doubted that I would even win the lottery and be able to run, but I set the goal anyway. The following eight months were some of the most intense of my life. I found myself dragging my exhausted body out of bed at unimaginable hours in order to don four layers and venture out into sub-zero temperatures. I remember certain markers. Two miles in November was a huge one. The same goes for five in February, and at the end of my eight miles in April, I felt like I had finished a bottle of champagne.

I also remember (vividly) a lot of bad runs. I could finish eight miles on a Sunday without blinking, and when Tuesday rolled around I'd find myself limping home after two miles.

Not to mention all of the skipped runs. I dismissed speed workouts (dumb), skipped long training runs (idiotic), and didn't take care of myself (suicidal). I spent a good portion of the spring laid up alternately with shin splints, the flu, and shin splints again.

Despite all of this, I found myself packing my car early Friday morning to head to Duluth. I spent Friday afternoon with my cousin and his family, chasing his four year old around the backyard and playing matchbox cars. Friday night found me in the fetal position on a cot in the basement, four alarms set so that I wouldn't oversleep.

Speaking of ungodly hours, Gary begins at 6:30 am. I understand the reasoning behind it, but standing in a dark kitchen eating peanut butter toast at 4:00 am, I began to doubt my own sanity. It took most of my strength to force down the toast and slam some Gatorade before barrelling out the door to catch my ride.

I rode the bus out to the starting point with an eight-time Gary finisher. One of the things that struck me most about the entire weekend was the incredible amount of camaraderie among most of the runners there. That and the crazies along the course. There was one bag-piper, several squeeze-box players, tons of frat boys trying to encourage us to do a beer bong, and a guy dressed up as Shrek along the course. Anyway, my bus friend pep-talked me for the entire half hour bus ride, and found me after the race to inquire about how it had gone.

I'll spare you the blow by blow analysis of the entire race. Suffice it to say that I ran too hard on my first seven miles, crashed on mile nine, and hobbled across the finish line. My only goal was that finish line, and I made it. Barely. I'm not sure what shock feels like, but I think I may have had a mild case of it. I limped around looking for water, my sweat bag, and my father. I eventually found all three, and my pep-talker from the morning. We swapped notes on the race and then went to watch the marathon-ers come through. I spent the next nine hours comparing race notes, stretching my aching muscles, and trying to re-balance my electrolyte levels.

For the past two days I've been laying low, dealing with some sore muscles, and recouping. My roommates have practically had to lock me into my house. The weather is perfect, and from my position on the couch I can see people running past. I'm desperate to go out again, but my muscles, better judgement, and roommates are holding me back. For the time being I'll have to content myself with planning my next races.

music

No real post.



Just a list of songs that have been on my Itunes repeat lately.



Gotta Have You: The Weepies

O Valencia!: The Decemberists

The Crane Wife 3: The Decemberists

Number 1: Goldfrappe

Black Panther: Mason Jennings

Delicate: Damien Rice

Jurassic 5: Quality Control

Lloyd, I'm Ready to be Heartbroken: Camera Obscura

Sweet Carolina: Ryan Adams

In My Time of Need: Ryan Adams

Eve, Apple of My Eye: Bell X1

Twilight: Elliott Smith

The Sea & The Rhythm: Iron and Wine

California: Mason Jennings

Your Smile is a Drug: Patrick Park

Starfish and Coffee: Prince

I have an unhealthy love for writing lists.

Additionally, I'm not sure if it's sad, slightly disturbing, or awesome that I can see the final panel of this comic as something I say in the near future. I hope the response is the same as it is here.

I've decided I'm going to start interviewing potential suitors through a committee. I hope to recruit the following individuals to aid me in the difficult, boring, and thankless screening process. I hope that the interviews will screen out the dim, self-absorbed, already engaged, and generally uninteresting men I seem to keep wasting my time with these days.

Mother Prosen: Through Mother Prosen, the gentleman in question will get a decent sampling of Baker/Fitzpatrick female insanity. He'll be forced to confront anything from ADD to odd questions about bowel movements and hobbies. This will be a pretty good snapshot of what my own neuroses will turn into thirty or so years down the road.

Michelle: Best judge of physical and emotional compatibility. Best friend of nearly ten years. Standing up to her indecent questions and laughing at her self-deprecating stories is a must.

Pumpkin: Nerd Alert! Will be able to determine if the suitor is a suitable nerd fit by asking him to finish the follow exchange:

"Fast ship? You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?"

"Should I have?"
(Answer here)

Wilderness Survivalist (TBD): I'm not joking. I don't date men who can't start a fire, split wood, portage a canoe, fish, or otherwise enjoy the outdoors.

GRE Test Administrator: Well, not quite. But I'm a big, intellectual dork at heart, and a certain amount of compatibility there is necessary to my personal happiness in a relationship.

Applications will include a questionnaire and short essay. If selected for the first round of interviews, the subject will be asked to reserve at least a six hour period for questions from the panel and psychological testing. Interested parties should contact the KMJ Companion Project. Box 129, Minneapolis, MN 55406.


But all jocularity aside, I had a conversation last week with one of my roommates. I confided that when it comes to the opposite sex, I have ridiculously high expectations. She laughed and commented "Hon, those expectations aren't only for men you're dating." Touche.


That said, I've decided to narrow down my long list of requirements for gentlemen callers down to two main points.

1. Must be a baseball fan. At this point, I'll even date a Twins fan. (Although after Friday and Saturday I've had a little bit of the air taken out of my sails. Yost is an idiot and needs to get it together. Hardy is out with a strained rotator cuff. I'm so bummed I could cry. But I digress. Forgive me for the links, but I'm not sure how many people are Brewers fans) Baseball is my favorite sport, and a must in my line-up of summertime activities. It doesn't get much better than sitting in the backyard, listening to Ueck announce a game. If I can't share my love of baseball with someone we're not going anywhere.



2. Must love Jane Austen. Normally, there would be a checklist of books/authors the guy must enjoy. However, for the sake of simplicity I've narrowed it down to just Jane. Tolkien can be inaccessible, and most of the world has never read Theological Investigations, so I needed to get it down to something both accessible and deeply loved. When I have a bad day, I watch some of the A&E version of Pride and Prejudice and smile like a dope throughout the entire movie. During the scene when Darcy and Elizabeth walk to Meryton together, I usually cry and feel like my heart is going to explode. I hold Maggie's hand when we watch it together. I love Austen's wit and her sparkling dialogue. I hope to write like her someday (particularly in Love and Friendship. *pffffffft*) I need someone who won't just walk in, roll his eyes while I cry for the 3,000th time at the end of Mansfield Park, and then leave.

Gentlemen who meet these two requirements can skip the questionnaire, essay, and interview process. I'll be in my backyard grilling and listening to the game. If things go well enough, perhaps we'll find ourselves reading some Sense and Sensibility while we're both drifting off.

Until then I think I'm going to start collecting newspapers and cats.

Almighty

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

-C.S. Lewis

I find myself in a bit of a faith bind at present. Not the epic faith crisis of finding out that the Bible is in fact, made up, but an interesting predicament nonetheless. It is mostly the result of two gentlemen, of whom I'm sure one would be infinitely amused if he knew how much difficulty his questions are causing.


The difficulty comes not from any disbelief in the doctrine of the Resurrection, or a deep rooted distrust in the validity of Scripture. Instead, I find myself focusing on something else I've always found particularly troublesome.


Prayer.


My senior year in college I had to take an upper-division theology class preselected by the department. I enrolled in Benedictine Spirituality and embarked on one of the most painfully boring academic experiences of my life. However, one of our conversations centered on prayer and spirituality. One of the books we read was about praying our experiences. I was irritated enough by most of the fluffy class content, but this one took the cake. The book's premise is that we can communicate with God by simply by talking through our day with another person.


Are you kidding? I mean, really? This constituted an upper division theology class? It was so fluffy and seemed like such an insincere cop-out of a prayer style that I wasn't the only person to leave the class feeling like I had just wasted well over an hour of my life. Despite our feelings of frustration, many of use acknowledged that we were bad "pray-ers" and that despite devoting four years of our respective lives studying God, we didn't know how to talk to Her. Most of us pushed this to the back of our minds and went about the everyday business of understanding God intellectually instead of trying to maintain a relationship.

Well, the question remained unanswered and I've always been nagged by the thought that there's something wrong with the way I pray. I've hated intercessory prayer for a long, long time. I've never been able to reason out why some intercessions are "answered" and some are not. I deeply dislike the expression "God has a plan for you" when used as a kind of condolence. It's a more arrogant response than anyone who's been in a position of real pain or distress should have to hear. How condescending can you be?

This is where my difficulty as a Christian lies. We are specifically told to pray for the recovery of our sick and our daily bread (to use Lewis's turn of phrase.) As I became a disciple (so to speak) of Rahner's I thought that I finally found a way out of my difficulty. Instead of praying for the recovery of our sick, we should pray for the grace to understand God's will in the world. This seemed to solve the difficulty for some time. But, again, the more I think about it, the more ridiculous this whole concept of prayer seems. I want, and believe that I am hard-wired to want, a God that I can understand personally. I want to be able to talk to Her the same way I talk to my mom when something's bothering me. I want to believe that there's an answer waiting somewhere for me if I can ever shut up long enough to hear it.

At this point, it seems as though the most intellectually sound thing I could do would be one of the following.

1. Drop the label of a Christian and the necessary prayer baggage that comes with it. (Much easier said than done, particularly as there's still that sticky believe in the Resurrection.)
2. Languish in a state of non-prayer and disregard it. Focus on the more concrete aspects of Catholicism (Catholic Social Teaching, mainly)

I'm not really a fan of either of these options. I don't have my blinders entirely on here. I know that religion is responsible for a number of horrifying things (the Crusades, the degradation of women, wars, etc.). But I've also seen the liberating aspects of faith when it (in my opinion) is used to better understand the world and build the kingdom on earth. I believe whole-heartedly that faith can, and does, help people to transform. My own conversion has transformed my life. It, like Lewis has said, has allowed me to see a number of other aspects of life that were hidden from me.

But it seems as though this transformation cannot occur without a personal God who listens and responds when you talk. But at the same time, I can't quite reconcile that God who listens to any of my intellectual ideas about God.

Perhaps I'm really an apostate and don't want to admit to it. It's possible that studying theology at a master's level is the very last thing that I need to do at this point in my life.

I'll wrap up with the video that really made me pause and try to figure out what my own feelings on prayer are.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/112

Untitled Poem

The days are too short.
Too full of angry voices
or cold disappointment. The best
hours wasted to computers,
phones, mail merges. They slip by,
barely noticed or painstakingly counted
until 4:30 and quitting time.
Today, I will lengthen the day.
Draw a warm bath and sink into it.
There, with eyes closed, I will meet you.
Only known through half-remembered dreams
and second-hand accounts. We've arranged
to introduce ourselves at the edge of the lake.
Together we'll walk in the autumn sunshine
and talk about Wild Geese and why Franny
won't get up from the sofa. Or maybe we can just share
those few thoughts that may have passed unconsciously
between us while one was rising, and the other just falling
asleep.