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Showing posts from 2016

Every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end

Hillary Clinton losing the election has elicited many feelings in me including anger, sadness, disappointment and fear.  In a few ways I can relate to her and what she was up against as an older not very pretty woman in a world still run by men.  She dedicated herself to making the world a better place and in doing so, by putting herself out there, she made mistakes as we all do.   I feel the need to let go of something I have held onto for the past 6 years - the loss of my career and my feelings of betrayal by many people I thought would be more honest with me.  I am a better person for these past years and I would not trade them for anything, but still I still have moments where I grieve and feel the pain of losing a big part of myself.   I am 63, a child of the 60’s and grew up in a small town in the midwest.  I burned my bra at my high school graduation party and protested the Vietnam war in college.  Ever since I was four, I wanted to be a nurse but only so that I would “

Today is not that day.

My friend Suzanne and I both signed up to run the Salt Lake Marathon which was in April.  After she had what she thought was a knee injury, she decided to switch to the half (13.1) instead of 26.2, a full marathon.  I hung on to the illusion I could run the marathon until I realized I hadn't trained enough and that my nagging hip pain would not make it fun.  It was hard to admit I could not just go out and do it, just "tough it out".  With age comes wisdom and the ego backs down a little bit in favor of common sense.  Sometimes, maybe for a little while. After you get to a certain age you just cannot up and run 26.2 miles without a lot of training. And training for a marathon gets harder and takes more out of you.    Having fun while running becomes more important than long distances and finishing with what one considers a "respectable" time".  The definition of "respectable times" becomes longer and longer as one's expectations reluctantly

in spite of my unfortunate chin

A month  or so  ago I was in Austin, Texas with my daughter and her friends, getting ready to run the Austin 1/2 marathon, which has become a tradition and a time to eat queso, drink many margaritas,  and go to chicken shit bingo.  We stayed at an Air BNB place that was nice, had great pillows and was, as usual, way better than a hotel.  Using my older, somewhat displaced bladder and frequent middle of the night urgencies as an excuse, I got the bedroom with the attached bathroom....and the memory foam pillows. I did appreciate the proximity of the bathroom.  All the memory foam pillows did for me was to allow me to remember my dreams or at least one of them.  And it was about my chin, of all things.   I was at an airport and a woman came up to me and said, "Go talk to that man over there.  He can read faces".  I wandered over to a stony faced guy with piercing, emotionless, blue eyes.  He had a chiseled, assassin looking face (yeah I have watched too many spy sho