1st Week of Marathon Training Down

September flew past me so fast I can't quite believe it is over. I'm not sure what has been going on with me lately. In some ways I've been getting lots of work done, writing work, which is always a good thing, but in other ways I feel like time has been flying by me and I have remained still, stuck in some sort of artificial calm brought on by exhaustion, watching life slip by with a glazed expression on my face. I should never be allowed to read essays in the New York Times magazine by people with whom my brain can imagine a tangential relationship. It makes me wonder what I have been doing for the last six years, besides graduate school. This week had an essay by a man from Corpus Christi, another Texas Gulf Coast town that I know well, and one from a student who was at Columbia at the same time I was. The Corpus Christi piece was especially poignant, for me at least, not surprising as it made me think of home and my own childhood. Did I mention it was written by the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, who only graduated from college 2 years before me, even if he was older than me when he started. Seriously, what have I been doing with my time?

The piece on the ethnic studies strike at Columbia in 1996 reminded me very specifically of my time there. I remember that strike, but I had a very different experience of it. My mother always talks about how her older sister always remembered their childhood so differently from her. What my mother remembers as happy events my aunt recalled as embarrassing and unwelcome affairs. Not that my experience of Columbia during that year was so drastically at odds with his, more that I saw things through a different lens, experiencing my own isolation through circumstances based less on color, language, or ethnicity and more on finances, regionality, or perhaps merely the habit of feeling alone.

But even as this entry reads a bit like a pity party, or at the very least as the ramblings of a semi-exhausted self-aware(centered?) graduate student, I have decided it is time to hitch up the proverbial pants, take a deep breath, and remember that I may not be writing essays for the Times, but who is to say what the future will bring, provided I keep working at it. I may be feeling somewhat trapped and sorry for myself, but as my father likes to remind me, there are no situations from which you cannot extricate yourself. After all, you got yourself into them. And there are worse things than living in places that force you to take a good long look at yourself. Now if only I can find a way to turn this into a nostalgic essay for the Times.

Oh, and I finished my first week of marathon training yesterday. Wow, am I out of proper running shape. This is going to be a long one my friends.