If I die on a run I'll die happy.

Of course I left work late on the day I put off my 13 miles until the evening.  Part of me was (as usual) tempted not to go but after walking in the front door I just threw on my running shoes and left again right away.  Good thing too, since it ended up being one of the best-feeling and most unexpectedly enjoyable runs in recent memory.

Going off the deep end

Every time I swim in a new pool with a proper deep end, like 9 feet or more, I have an "oh shit" moment as I come over the edge of the shallow end and see the full depth. Then I usually start laughing while trying not to choke.  It's kind of fun, I hope I don't get used to it.
This is especially entertaining given that I have no idea how deep the water is off Coney Island where I swim in the summers. Doubtless not very impressive in the grand scheme of things but probably more than 15 feet. I wonder if I could see the depth would I still do it... 
"Sure" I would.

Everything's coming up facilitation.

In college I had a class on intergroup dialogue facilitation – my groups were women of color and white women – which had all kinds of long-lasting detrimental effects like a persistent habit of identifying as feminist and an occasional tendency toward annoying social-justice-speak. But in large part, practice in active listening, group observation, fostering trust and maintaining impartiality, and intergroup power dynamics fell by the wayside after college; law school doesn't really lend itself to “fostering communication,” unless you're trying to tell to the court how opposing counsel is a troglodyte whose arguments are a Threat to the Rule of Law Itself. Recently, though, these concepts have been emerging again in ways that would allow a nice “I-told-you-so” in the direction of everyone who was skeptical about such a use of my tuition dollars.

In which a young Dana discovers that impressions of Nancy Drew do not predict reality.

When I was growing up and reading a lot of Nancy Drew books, I came across one that sent her to Istanbul. It described something like how the people there were wearing a mix of veils and “Western dress.” So in my head I made up an image of half of Turkish women in burqas and half in, like, gingham dresses with aprons and cowboy boots.

That image kept popping back up when I was in Turkey last summer. I don't think it's quite what the author meant.