Running a ten mile race without DYING!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I entered to run the 2010 Broad Street Race in Philly. Originally, my sister urged me into signing up for the race so that we could do it together. But then she waited until mid-April to register, and lo and behold, the registration had been capped—at a mere 30,000 people. So I ended up running the race by myself, and an amazing experience it was indeed. I realized after completing the race that this is the first time ever in my 27 years that I have ever done something athletically competitive. In my youth, I dropped out of ballet when I found out we had to participate in recitals. I quit the swim team because I was so nervous about competing in a swim meet. I never played softball with my sister for fear I’d be terrible. And I threatened to join the high school cross country team, but never did. Yup, I was a big old chicken (rightfully so—I was really never the athletic type). Training for and completing a ten mile run was a really fun experience. (Ok, so maybe the shin splints I’ve picked up along the way weren’t so much fun, but aside from them, yes, fun).

The morning started out at the ass-crack-o-dawn. I had to be on the Broad Street Line to the starting point by 6:30. Worried about traffic, Scott and I got up at 4:30 am to leave the house by 5. Of course, there was no traffic and we rolled into the Wachovia Center lot at 5:41 am. I hopped on the train, despite my fear of getting lost on public transportation, I assured myself that the herd method and the fact that the Broad Street Express made only two stops would idiot-proof my ride. I was right. I followed the rest of the runners to the starting line. The only problem then was that I was more than two hours early for the race. Which meant two things: 1) that I had plenty of time to sit around and get nervous and 2) that I had plenty of time to sit around and wonder if I should visit the porta potty again. (For the record, I made three visits…I blame having nothing else to do).

Porta potties galore!

The race started at 8:30, but I was in the yellow corral. Yellow corral = faster than the pink corral, but slower than everyone else. So I didn’t actually start running until just after 9 am. Also, did I mention that the high temperature for the day was 90 degrees? It was a bit steamy, but the city of Philadelphia made sure to have fire hydrants on to spray the runners. There was also a nice breeze and running in the shade of the buildings was a huge help.

Yellow Corral: Hell No We Ain't The Slowest!

I think the coolest thing was seeing the joe schmoes of Philadelphia come out and cheer us on. It really was an awesome feeling, and there was such a sense of camraderie and love (ok, maybe that was my running endorphins kicking in, but I don’t care). It helped me get through those tough miles (all ten of them—just kidding). I think the first five miles were probably the toughest, and then I just went into autopilot once I hit City Hall, which was a bit past the five mile mark.

City Hall, halfway to the finish!

Loving on the enthusiastic spectators

At some point, I began looking for my delinquent sister, who said she’d come cheer me on. I searched the crowd until I stepped in a pothole and narrowly avoided twisting my ankle. At that point, I decided to just concentrate on the road, avoiding potholes and leftover water cups that had been strewn about. Later on, I learned that my sister had, in fact, seen me—and she also chased me down Broad Street, screaming and yelling at me, to get my picture! I had no idea whatsoever.

"IN THE ZONE" (apparently)

Water cup cleanup crew

Towards the end of the race, there was a lady yelling through a megaphone that we only had 1.5 miles left. THANK GOD! I became a running machine and just kept going, a la Forrest Gump. We ran into the Navy Yard, where the finish was .25 miles inside the gate. A few days after the race, my coworker (who had also run the race) commented on how cool it was to see the ships in the Navy Yard. Ships? There were ships? Yes, apparently there were large war vessels looming over me, and I had no idea. I was just that focused on finishing (and not stepping in a pothole). Running across the finish line, waving like a tool at the photographers, was euphoric. It was so cool to accomplish something like a ten mile race, especially never having remotely done anything like that before in my life. I felt a bit like the Phanatic, but I was really glad to not be one of the poor people suffering from heat exhaustion.

Done!

Now I’m thinking about doing the Philly half marathon…. Hmmmm…. HMMMMM…. HMMMMMM????

(All photos, except the ones of me, are from Independence Blue Cross’ Flickr)

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Big changes are occurring around here. Chief among them are that I am MOVING! And also, running a ten mile race without DYING! And also, my mom is getting RE-MARRIED! And I did her wedding invitations:

Not too shabby for designing, printing, and mailing them in a week. Luckily, my mom’s also cool and basically set a few parameters for what she wanted and otherwise let me run with it. I don’t feel it’s often that a client would let their designer play with gigantic italic uppercase type. But I did, and mixed it with some watercolor flower paintings I did, and voila! I have to get better pictures than these iPhone shots and also take some of the envelope labels as well, but for now these will do.

The other thing I had to do was clothe myself for said event, in which my sister and I are bridesmaids. Luckily again for the both of us, my mom had no requirements of taffeta and David’s bridal matching bridesmaids dresses, which is awesome. There’s nothing worse than dropping $160 on a perfectly nice dress that yes, you could wear again, and it’s pretty, but everyone can take one look at it and know it’s a bridesmaid dress. But then it takes up a huge chunk of your closet because you feel bad throwing out $160 worth of Alfred Angelo’s finest designs. So I took my debit card to Anthropologie and bought a gorgeous dress that I have no doubt I will wear for forever and ever. And I even splurged on a new bracelet. Damn, that Anthropologie’s hard to say no to.

More on the other life-changing events to come. Until then, I get to pack boxes and boxes of 27 years worth of accumulated crap. Oh fun!

Oh, and:

I guess this sort of thing works to get people to sign leases in a college town? Hey woo, look at the free pizza! Oh look, you just signed a 13 month lease, sucker!

I couldn’t have said it better myself, so I won’t try.

From The Sartorialist:

A Graceful Man, A Gentleman

Thanks everyone for all your great suggestions on books about modern manners. I can’t wait to get a few and brush up on a few things before my next big dinner party.

For me, this is blogging at it’s best. Being able to create a community of individuals that share information and ideas that can make the community as a whole a better place. Thank you.

One of the things I mentioned yesterday, was the “manner” of a person. “Manner” or “grace” is not something that you can learn from a book. Unfortunately, it is something you just have to be or to develop.

A great scene of modern grace on ’30 Rock’ the other day:

Liz and Jack went out to dinner at a very chic restaurant. As they sat down at the table, Jack immediately moved the candle from the center of the setting to the side of the table. Liz looked at him kinda funny, not understanding why he did that but, not really caring either. Later, however, when Liz reached across the table to steal some of Jack’s food (as she always does), she realized he moved the candle so her sleeve wouldn’t catch fire when she reached across the table. Jack’s manner and grace were so attuned to her as a friend, that he knew her moves before she did. That tiny gesture ended up becoming the pivotal moment of the episode and changed the course of their business relationship.

I’m telling you guys again, women notice the small stuff. They notice the gentleness/gentlemenliness more than if you use the right fork at dinner. I’m a very lucky man, Garance notices every little kindness I offer her, she doesn’t miss a thing. Knowing that makes it so much more rewarding to do even more little things for her. I’ll be honest, my biggest obsession in life right now is not better shoes, more suits or a bigger career but, to simply be a more graceful man for my graceful woman.

So women, in the spirit of grace, manner and Valentine’s Day, take a moment and share with us men some of the little kindnesses that your man has done for you that made your heart flutter. Us men might learn something and you might gain an even more graceful man, a gentleman.

Editor’s Note: For my gay readers, I can only write this as I know it, a man loving a woman. Don’t let this keep you from joining the conversation. If you have tiny acts of kindness from a boyfriend to a boyfriend, or girlfriend to a girlfriend, please share with us!
Grace is Grace.
It doesn’t matter who you’re lovin’, it’s how you’re lovin’!

posted by The Sartorialist at 6:16 AM

I have a new excuse!

I go in fits and spurts of blogging. I do love to write, but I have been super busy. Some of being super busy includes being cheesy as all hell (reference above from someecards.com) but a lot of it also comes from big opportunities happening in the design world. So I’m not a complete sap, I swear.

Wow.

Let’s hope I never have to write a list like this out again. (Found from a few years ago).

More commentary on how Facebook makes some peoples’ brains become overwhelmed with rainbows and butterflies

Right. So.

When I wake up in the morning, usually the first thing I do after turning off my iPhone alarm is fire up my email and Facebook. Yeah, I know whatever…I’ll take a break for you to snicker at my obsessive social networking and pretend like you aren’t in the same boat. Yesterday, I fired up FB and saw that red circle with a white plus sign in it that means SOMEONE WANTS TO BE YOUR FRIEND! Yay, I’m popular! So I tap on the friend request to see just who this person might be that wants to be my friend. And lo and behold, the person that wants to be my friend….was in fact, my nemesis from the sixth grade. We shall call her “TT” for the purposes of this blog post.

You might want to know the reason why TT was my arch enemy in the sixth grade. Well, suffice it to say #1 reason was that she was a huge, raging, eleven-year-old bitch. You know how only pre-teens can encompass that off-the-charts level of bitchy never quite able to be mastered by older women, because people aren’t really sure if they’re serious, because really they’re still kind of children, how could they possibly have such rotten souls at such a young age? It was that level of bitch. Never encountered before by my bumbling, nerdy, more or less harmless (unless you were one of my younger siblings) self.

I remember that TT made sixth grade pretty hellish for me. It was a nice introductory precursor to the even more hellish depths of seventh and eighth grades. There was one incident in particular that I remember like it was just yesterday, that forever cemented her arch enemy status…

It was January, and in sixth grade, you still have to go out to 45 minutes of recess, even in sub zero temperatures, even if you’re a slightly chubby, inactive nerd that would much rather sit in a quiet and heated classroom reading the latest R.L. Stein Fear Street book, but I digress. So my best friend and I were huddled out on the ghetto playground afforded to us as 4th-6th graders. I say ghetto because it was in inner-city Wilmington. It was not uncommon for us to pass by drug busts on the way to and from school, see homeless people digging discarded cafeteria food out of the school dumpsters, and find used needles/condoms and plenty of broken glass on the playground. Clearly, a safe haven for children. So this abysmal playground had very little to offer to us. Usually, the swings were taken, and all we wanted to do was try and stay warm anyway. We wandered around the perimeter of the playground and happened upon a small treasure: a discarded tube of Chapstick. Nevermind that it probably had AIDS festering all over it, we got a brilliant idea. We would smear Chapstick all over an open swing, and then convince TT that she should swing on it. Mind you, this was 1993, and the height of the Starter jacket craze. Being that it was January, all the cool kids had just gotten Starter jackets for Christmas and proudly wore the colors of the popular teams: Charlotte Hornets, Miami Dolphins, Notre Dame, and the Chicago Bulls. TT had a prized Bulls pullover Starter. And of course, everything was oversized. So when we convinced her to sit on the Chapstick-laden swing, she got a nice coating of waxy goo alllllll over the rump of her brand new Starter Jacket.

Of course, we thought this was hilarious and a wonderful payback because she had NO CLUE about our evil plan! That was, until my friend grew a pesky conscience and decided to tattle on us. Damnit, Valerie!

It was the only time I ever went to the principal’s office in my twelve years of school. I can remember Mr. Vassos (he was a rather rotund man and we used to call him Mr. Fatsos…yeah, kids can be mean little bastards) threatening to call my parents, but he didn’t since I had a previously clean record. In the end, I gave TT an apology and offered to pay to dry clean her Starter jacket.

Her response: “This jacket means more to me than you ever will!”

Well, ok then. At least we’re in agreement on how we feel about one another. Except I guess she must have forgotten that she ever said that, because now, she wants to be my friend on FB. And I finally did accept the friend request. I don’t know why. She can’t really see anything worthwhile on my page. She’s married to a balding thug that went to our high school and has just had her third child. According to her profile, she is a consultant for Passion Parties… “THOSE parties,” as she puts it. Well, TT, I hope that you’re living a fulfilled life. Sure, we’re friends now. I hope your Starter jacket is still doing well and you can avoid Chapstick butt. Just don’t cross me.

Oh Ten in Da Hizzouse

I ran across this resolution generator that I thought was pretty cool. Here are some of my reso’s for this year:

(Not likely, but good practice, I suppose)

(And squirrel it away so that Wells Fargo can’t get at it)

(I make this resolution every year. I’ve gotten better, but I’m sure my dentist would still be horrified by my irregular flossing habits)

(Well…yeah. I used to be a lot better at this when I was in school and wasting time on a regular basis)

(This is the big’un!)

Festivus For the Restofus, Unless You’re Me

This picture made me laugh. “When I was a boy, we didn’t have ergonomic snow shoves, YOU WUSSIES!”

Well, no one in my family thought to get an ergonomic snow shovel, let alone salt or anything else useful. I spent an hour today trying to get my car out of the driveway to go to a party. I got as far as halfway into the street, but then my car would not budge. It would neither move forward or backward, which was problematic on many levels. The first one concerning me was that I really wanted to go to this party. The second being that the monster trucks with snow plows had been trolling around the neighborhood and I knew they would either scream at me for having my car halfway in the street, plow right into it, or just plow it in, which would compound the problem that it was stuck on a mound of snow with blocks of ice under the wheels. I tried diligently to dig out, around, and under my car, but it still would not move. It is times like these that I lament the fact that I do not have a redneck boyfriend with a big truck (actually, that’s probably the only time I’ve lamented that fact) and that my parents got divorced years ago so I no longer have my dad around to do fatherly things like getting his daughter’s car un-stuck from a snow drift. Finally, I was able to get ahold of my brother, who after a half an hour of directing me on how to maneuver my car, finally told me to get out of the car and he performed some sort of Tokyo Drift magic to get it back up into the driveway. From that point, I was still determined to at least try and get out of the neighborhood and so I attempted to shovel out the rest of the driveway and the frozen slush in the curb that was causing me so many problems, and I was shoveling with an old, non-ergonomic shovel that I’m pretty sure was produced right around 1958. By the time I was finished, I looked up to find at least a foot of snow had drifted around my tires. It was at that point, with wet hair, a dripping nose, sweating underneath all my layers, a nice caking of snow all up in my ankles, and pretty sure there was probably some plumber’s crack in this equation too, that I finally decided to give up. As much as I want to go to this party, I want to not get stranded on I-95 with nothing but a bag of bagels and a handle of tequila (make that bad tequila) more. So, I swallowed my pride, cursed my little car with the low bumper, put down my shovel (which, thinking back on it, I might have just thrown it down in the snow because I was annoyed…hm, not such a smart move) and came inside.

On the bright side, now I get to work on stuff that I put off all week and possibly FINALLY watch the season finale of Dexter. I guess in a bizarre way, Mother Nature was trying to tell me that I should work, and not party. I don’t really agree with that, but now I can feel less guilty for all of the work that I did not accomplish earlier. Except that I’m currently writing this blog. Hmm.

Grandma.

Grandma was the one whose house we always went to when we got sick. In return for downing some overly pulpy store brand orange juice, she would paint my nails bright red, let me play with her makeup and costume jewelry while sitting at her vanity, and watch hours and hours of David the Gnome, Eureeka’s Castle, and Inspector Gadget in Nickelodeon. Grandma was the one who would pick me up from middle school and drive me to the orthododontist in her yacht on wheels ’89 white Grand Marquis with a navy blue rag top. Grandma was the one who told us to eat our bread crusts so that we would have curly hair, and who always wore a skirted bathing suit and pink lipstick while swimming in Candlewood Lake. Grandma was the one who would leave her wicker chair on the front porch to get a drink, and when she returned she would kick out any chair squatters by using the force of the Matriarch. Grandma was the one who loved to drink Old Fashioneds while grandpa had a Manhattan. Here’s to you, Grandma. I hope you’re at peace.