Today at work at about 1:30 in the afternoon I realized there was something terribly wrong with me. I was utterly exhausted, yawning every few minutes, and making stupid mistakes like meaning to forward an email but replying to it instead, with what might be considered an inappropriate reply. For instance, a very sweet girl emailed me today from one of the high schools. Apparently she is “Miss” something or other in this valley, as in, a pageant winner, and she has decided that her platform is “A Little Art is Not Enough”. I mean, I’m giggling about it right now. I sent it to my program manager, and we went into fits of giggles impersonating this sweet girl. “Um, hi, so I think that a little art isn’t enough, in fact, maybe lots of art isn’t enough, and, plus, World Peace.” But unfortunately, I sent my first response, intended for my program manager, right back to this very sweet and sincere girl-almost-woman who really wants to help out in our arts ed program. When you work at a struggling non-profit, you really need the chance to laugh whenever possible, so while we will work with this enterprising young woman, we will still giggle at her platform’s expense.

Anyway, when I started making mistakes like that, I realized something was really wrong, and I couldn’t stop pushing my keyboard out of the way and laying my head down on my desk. On Easter, I had a long talk with Tessa about running. I was like, “Why does this hurt so much?” and she basically said, “Quit being a fool!” although she said it much more gently and with terrific advice. Turns out beginning runners should run twice, three times a week at best, and I’ve been doing six times a week plus working out. Uber, uber stupid. The last time I put my head on my desk, I lifted it and checked out runnersworld.com and looked up all the tips for beginning runners. Dear Tess was quite right. I had skipped my morning run yesterday, but went on it today, thinking that one day might vastly improve my performance, but of course, instead of running I went to the gym. Basically, today, my body decided it had had ENOUGH ALREADY, and it shut down. At 2 PM I turned off my computer, came home, went to bed, and woke up at 6, still exhausted, but with a little more clarity. Tomorrow, I shall do nothing active, and perhaps- maybe- go for a walk on Thursday. It’s difficult when the only way to keep self-loathing at bay is to get out and run away from it.

I’ll admit in a sad sort of way that when I am out on the road at 6:45 PM, or on the treadmill, or doing my third set of reps, what inspires me is that I will be able to serve everyone in Africa so much better if I’m strong. I think about Peace Corps, and/or New York, every single day. I don’t know how soon I’ll finally be able to do either, and when I finally do Peace Corps, I don’t know if I’ll end up in Africa. But the idea of being strong, and being able to run if I have to, truly motivates me to keep on going. That dream, that passion is no less strong than it was two years ago when I stayed up ’til four AM completing my application. Indeed, I feel like the skills I’m learning right now will only make me a stronger Peace Corps candidate, and a stronger candidate still when I return for whatever I choose to do next. I don’t know when any of this will happen, but I guarantee it will.

But, for now, I’m going to go back to bed.

One of the most truthful lines in the movie “Hotel Rwanda” was when a fuzzy-faced Joaquin Phoenix says “I think people will watch this footage and say, ‘oh, that’s terrible’, and go back to eating their dinner.” Phoenix’s character had just captured footage of militant Hutus hacking Tutsis with machetes. The movie is, actually, relatively tame in its depiction of the horrors of the Rwandan genocide. Tame in a respectful way; the filmmakers didn’t go for gore, they went for story, and I thank them, because had there been just the slightest bit more hacking, I simply would not have made it through. I have a pretty good idea what happened in Rwanda in ’94, and my memory and research of those events filled out the movie for me more than I might have wished.

And then, today, driving to work, I hear about the student in Minnesota who gunned down 9 people in his school, and possibly his own grandparents. Will everyone in this country hear about it, shake their heads, and go back to whatever they were doing before? Our asswipe president is trying to intervene to waylay Terri Schiavo’s wishes, but will he actually *do* anything about the student who shoots his peers? Will anyone? Driving to work, I wondered if I should go into politics, but does anything actually get done? Would the change I’d want to affect ever actually happen? Will anyone take responsibility for any of this?

When Bill Clinton was on Larry King, he was asked what the greatest mistake of his presidency was. “Personal mistake or presidential mistake?” Clinton said. “We all know my biggest personal mistake.” He smiled and then said that not intervening in Rwanda was the greatest mistake of his presidency. Little comfort, but a rare moment in American history. And what must the Rwandans feel today, when we have a president who spends billions of dollars to invade a country under false allegations? Why haven’t we done anything about Darfur?

I suppose it’s no surprise that my country cares little about brown people overseas, when it shrink-wraps its own tragedies to fit neatly in the evening news and then flushes them down the toilet of our consciousness. How long will anyone be talking about Red Lake High School, except as reference when the next shooting occurs?

And what can I do about any of this?

… it is truly extraordinary outside. Not 72-degrees-sunny-breezy extraordinary, but crazy confused and wonderful. It POURED all morning, and then it just got mad outside. Bursts of downpours followed by warm sun, sprinkles, then wild winds. You’d need your whole closet to properly dress for this day.

I’ve realized how much New York is still in me. (No bad jokes here, Sean.) I was able to rent my cottage because I was the first to respond, and then I systematically romanced my landlady-to-be. If I ever get this car, it will only be because I was the first to call and because I have persevered. I’ve been waiting to buy a VW Golf for over a month now- it’s exactly what I want- but it has had some issues passing smog and now is in the shop awaiting a new catalytic converter. Anyway, there is a good chance that on Wednesday it will be mine. People were calling for both the cottage and the car up to a month after they were listed, thinking they might still be available. There is a tempo here, a lackadaisical pace that runs the whole valley, and as of yet, I’ve been unable to fall in step. I’m accustomed to everyone being at least fifteen minutes late to hour-long meetings; it seems as though if we can’t fix it in forty-five minutes, it can’t be done. Anyhoodle…

Yesterday, for the first time since I moved here, my body felt different. I was walking up the stairs to my work and my legs felt strange in my pants. It’s hard to describe. Just a week ago today, last Saturday, I finally figured out how to run. Not, you know, how to sorta hop from one foot to the other whilst propelling myself, but how to keep going when every part of me is screaming “THIS IS BORING AND STUPID AND DOESN’T FEEL GOOD AND LET’S EAT FRENCH FRIES”.

I cycled almost 400 miles in four days during the Northeast Aids Ride a few years ago, and there must have been a hundred moments during that ride when I crested a hill just to see a vast, steep, new one waiting for me on the other side. One day on that ride there were forty “hills of note”. Of NOTE. That didn’t count any of the little ones.

When you hit hill of note 25, and you know you have at least 15 more to go, and you have at least 40 more miles to go, and you rode all day yesterday, and have two more days ahead of you, you are presented with a choice. You stop, let the sweep truck pick you up, and get to camp early and get first dibs on the taco bar. OR, you keep going. You seem to lose the connection to your legs because you are so far past your breaking point but they keep going, they keep circling, they keep pushing and pulling you up the hill. When you round the bend of hill 40 and people are screaming and cheering and someone yells, “WHO JUST RODE YOUR FIRST CENTURY?” and you raise your fist and your friends are smiling around you and you are abso-fucking-lutely sobbing from the pain and exhaustion, you know that something has happened and you are just a little different than you were yesterday.

Nothing like that has happened to me in a long time. I reached that point too many times in my years in New York, having no idea how to pace myself, never stopping until I landed in the hospital with migraines or hemorrhoids or a bike wreck. I came to Napa to recharge, and god knows I’ve done that. I’ve learned how to be soft, I know what it’s like to be rock hard, and I want to gravitate to the space between where I can be most useful. My friends here don’t really know the authentic me; they know someone plagued with an ugly mixture of self-loathing and pride. But I feel as though I am rediscovering me, and that is what is most important. I feel like I’ll be able to do it right this time.

I’ve been power-walking/jogging almost every morning for a couple of months now. I’ll jog for a minute, then power walk for a while, then jog, then walk. No matter the weather, it’s gorgeous down my road, so it’s easy to get up at 6:30 AM and get outside. But last Saturday, I was jogging, and then I realized I was past the marker where I usually start to walk again. And I kept on going, and kept on going, and suddenly it was like that feeling I had as a teenager when we went on a road trip to Santa Cruz and I didn’t eat meat for three days. Then, I said to myself, “Well, if I can do this for three days, I can do it for the rest of my life”. And I have. Or like in high school when I was in yet another unbearable class and I would say to myself, “I can do this for forty-five minutes. What’s forty-five minutes? I can do this for twenty. For ten. For five” until the class would end. So, Saturday, I passed the next marker, and the next, and then realized that if I could run for ten minutes, I could run for twenty. If I could run one mile, certainly I could run two. Two translated into four this morning, in the pouring rain. Because yesterday, my legs were different in my pants. They were markedly stronger, barely smaller, as if the last few months of exercising were suddenly slapped awake by my short runs.

I’m still chubby as hell, and by god, my writing about it is not an open invitation for anyone in my family to give me shit about it. And this is probably no big deal to any of you runners out there. But it reminds me that I can climb hill 40 and still get back on the bike tomorrow.