I'm on a boat!

Last Friday it emerged that my Sunday afternoon departure was moved to Saturday evening, meaning I had to cram 60 hours of packing and schlepping activity into 36—a feat which would have been impossible but for the invaluable assistance of three very dear souls (you know who you are).

Pro tip: When your broker says that freighter travel requires flexibility, believe him.

Worldly Pursuits II: When We Last Met Our Heroine...

My my, this blog title really is evergreen.

At least where a freighter voyage to Germany is involved.

Which it is here. To Hamburg specifically, by way of Baltimore, Virginia, Halifax, and Liverpool, then on to Berlin.

"What a curiously circuitous itinerary," you might say.

Zenjuries, aka We're All Gonna Die Anyway

A few weeks ago I ran the Manhattan Half in Central Park and it was, like, nine different kinds of fun. Since the onset of a nasty pain--from a stress fracture it turned out--in my left foot on a long run last April, this was my longest distance (not counting the impromptu walk/run hybrid that finished off the AC Half-Iron two days after I last took off ye olde walking boote). The soreness after the race was so very very sweet.

After a few days' recovery to re-focus on Oreo consumption, that Friday I went for my scheduled one-hour run and felt the exact. Type of pain. As before. In the exact. Same. Place. 

 

BOLLOCKS.

On Politics, the Media, and the English Language

Ol' Wristy is getting better. Again. Still in a brace, but we're going swimming in six days, whether it likes it or not.

In the meantime, dear god, is this week's On The Media ("Normalize This!") ever relevant. Because I write things for my day job, and because I've been thinking a lot lately about the principles that comprise "plain language," I've also been thinking about George Orwell's Politics and the English Language. And if the timeliness of this essay wasn't established already, OTM - discussing what it means when the media use "normalizing," "politically correct," "alt-right," etc. - brought it home fiercely.

Love and a very short fuse

Pardon the inconsistent timeline; I wrote this last Thursday and just got to post it today.

Since that foot fiasco over the summer I've only really been running since the beginning of October. Monday was the first day it felt natural again. Today's run was short - just one loop of the park - but it reminded me how much I love it and how it clears ye olde noggin like nothing else.

During the run I got Leonard Cohen's "Anthem" stuck in my head ("There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in") and realized that what the world needs is another blog post quoting that song, so here is that post. 

...and I feel fine.

People, horrified by whatever the latest turn of the 2016 election is, claim they simply can't pay attention to media coverage anymore lest they clutch their pearls so tightly they choke. But the same people, according to this radio piece, have apparently also stopped going to the movies and watching TV, and have even foregone football (heavens!) for the sake of the real-life drama of “forcible grabbing, groping, small hands and tongue gymnastics in the current presidential election” (not sure what that last one's about TBH). And, so the argument went, the reason they're doing so is to sate their addiction to "junk entertainment."

In the Matter of Cure v. Disease

Horrors! Advances on a married woman!

Never mind that this person didn't ask to be groped by tiny orange hands attached to an orange subhuman chancre. Irrelevant that she rejected these actions out of hand. The true affront, my fellow Americans, to the entire body politic and to thinking self-determined humans everywhere is the marital status of the vixen in question.