Tag Archives: New York City

Something About Me

16 Feb

You guys?  I like the opera.  It’s true!  I have gone to the opera twice in the last year or so and I liked it both times!  If I had told my 15-year-old self, or even my 25-year-old self, this bit of information both of those selves, and all the selves in between, probably would have laughed and said something along the lines of

“Why in the world would you want to sit in a room and listen to people yodel for 4 hours?”

Here’s the thing.  Opera singers, as it turns out, do not yodel.  To be fair, I don’t think I ever thought they actually yodeled, I think it was just my way of being a dismissive asshole.  Kids, you know?  (Also maybe 25-year-olds?)

Anyway so last night my friend Dee took me to see Rusalka at The Metropolitan Opera and it was really great.  Here are some facts:

–> Rusalka, by Antonin Dvorak,* is one of the most successful Czech operas.

–> The story-line was written by the poet Jaroslav Kvapil based on fairy tales by Karel Jaromir Erben and Bozena Nemcova.

–> As if we didn’t all know this already, fairy tales are deeply disturbing.

–>A ‘Rusalka,’ in Slavic mythology, is a water sprite who most often lives in a lake or a river.

As one might assume, the character Rusalka in Rusalka is a water nymph and a lot of the staging takes place in and around a neat little lake thing.  Set designers are really unbelievable.  I think maybe I will be a set designer in my next life.  The basic story is that Rusalka, stuck in the depths of the lake, falls in love with a human and goes to the witch Jezibaba to be turned into a human so that she can experience the love of her prince.  Jezibaba says that in return Rusalka must give up her voice.  Obviously I was having flashbacks to The Little Mermaid through the entire opera which kind of made me feel like a bad person and also very deeply American.  (I know it was written by Hans Christian Anderson [a Dutchman!] but all I can think of is Walt Disney.)  I kept imagining Jezibaba with 8 arms.  Sadly, or happily maybe, she only had two and that did not change at any point during the performance.  There was scandal!  There was cheating!  There was heartbreak!  There was serious repetition of the words ‘alas’ and ‘woe.’  I’m not going to give away the particularities of the ending just in case you want to see it, but if you want a clue just imagine what would have happened had The Little Mermaid taken an incredibly tragic turn and someone died.  It really had to happen that way because, as far as I can tell, a good opera has a very drawn-out death scene.  It’s not an opera unless someone lies crumpled on the ground, vocal cords exhausted, when the final curtain falls.

Unlike The Little Mermaid, Rusalka was 4 hours long with two intermissions.  Dee and I got “seats” in the Family Circle which basically meant we were relegated to standing at the tippy top of the theater leaning on carpeted platforms that had the little translation screens embedded in them.  (Note to anyone who decides to go see it: be careful that you don’t hit the button to the right of the screen with your elbow and spend the first 10 minutes of the performance trying to decipher the songs sung in Russian using German subtitles.  There are English subtitles.  I went through this so you don’t have to.)  You might think “ugh, how awful!  What a waste of money!”  Well, you would be wrong!  It is true, we couldn’t make out facial expressions or the details of the sets or costumes, but what we could do was hear the voices which, in opera, do not use any sort of amplification other than what is provided by the architecture of the theater itself.  We were standing SO HIGH and yet we could hear the performers’ voices over all the hundreds of people and seats and over all the instruments in the pit. And let me tell you there were a lot of instruments in there.  To think about it is really awe inspiring.

As a feminist there were parts of the story that I found problematic.  In modern parlance I would say that there was quite a bit of slut shaming throughout.  But the thing was written in the late 1890s so I really have to forgive it that.  It is interesting, though, to really think about how long the history of gender inequality is and how deeply our cultural understanding of the role of men and women really runs.  It makes people’s preconceived notions much more understandable, even though they are based in antiquated ideas and therefore should be challenged.  That particular problem aside, I thought the opera was lovely.  And I was impressed by the diversity of the crowd.  And I was very thankful that, at an institution as incredible and beautiful as The Met, I was able to go out for a magical and affordable night with one of my best girlfriends.  Let’s hope that great art always finds a way to be affordable for as many people as possible, even if it means 4 hours of standing.

So, yea, if you’re in New York, give the opera a whirl.  You won’t be disappointed.  Even if you find it’s not your thing, just bask in the incredible possibility of human talent and hard work.  It’ll take your breath away.

*I don’t know how to make all the appropriate accents and pronunciation marks over his name.  I am not good at technology.  Sorry, Dvorak.

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Rebekah’s Official List of the Worst Jobs Ever to Have in NYC During a Heat Wave

18 Jul

On a walk down 5th Avenue today in the height of heat (well, let’s be honest, basically every time feels like the height of heat this week) and after seeing some idiot running on the sunny side of the street without carrying water, I started thinking about some of the jobs that I would absolutely hate to have during this heat wave.  To be fair, most of the jobs I am about to list are jobs that I would hate to have at basically any time but right now they seem especially unpleasant.  Also, I am pretty sure that these jobs can fit into one of the three following categories, or some combination of multiple categories, thereby making them especially awful:

(1) Jobs that involve mostly being in the out of doors during the sunny part of the day and especially those jobs that include intense, or even not so intense, physical exertion of some kind;

(2) Jobs that involve dealing with things that are stinky which are necessarily made extra stinky by the oppressive heat;

(3) Jobs that involve dealing with the public because, let’s be honest, the heat makes people crazy.

These items appear in no particular order mostly because the heat has made me too lazy to come up with any sort of scoring system to make ordering them make sense.  Also, if you have suggestions for jobs I might have forgotten, feel free to send them along and if they might my highly rigorous standards (AKA as long as they are funny and/or things that I would hate doing) I will add them in!  And without further ado, Rebekah’s Official List of the Worst Ever Jobs to have in NYC During a Heat Wave.

1. Sanitation worker2. The people who clean out the port-o-potty’s in Prospect Park or, let’s be honest, anywhere at all
3. The counter person in one of those trendy, or not-so-trendy, food trucks
4. Traffic cop, both the people who give out tickets and the people stuck standing in the middle of the asphalt surrounded by hot and angry drivers who they have to tell where they can and cannot go (wearing pants and one of those silly orange vests for safety)
5. The lady who sells empanadas (or as I like to call them, fried sandwiches) on 5th Avenue and then has to push her cart all the way back to Sunset Park which involves going uphill
6. Emergency response people
7. Door men at fancy hotels (sort of related question:  are there door women?  I have never seen one.)
8. Security guards who have to wear black t-shirts and stand outside looking tough.  In my experience looking tough makes you hotter
9. Delivery people for restaurants
10. Postal workers
11. Seriously pregnant women (that counts as a job, right?)
12. Someone working in an ice cream store that has run out of ice cream
13. Winder washers
14. People that lay asphalt
15. Anyone working on the roof
16. Camp counselors
17. People who work in the kitchen.  Believe me, I just boiled some peanut butter and honey and other shit to make homemade granola bars and basically almost died
18. Movers
19.  People who deliver kegs of beer to bars and have to somehow get them down the stairs and also people who deliver sodas and beer to grocery stores and bodegas
20. People who work in a store that’s air conditioner has broken or that has owners who are too cheap to buy an air conditioner and so not only are those people stuck working in the stuffy stuffy place in which they work, drowning in a pool of their own sweat, but also they have to deal with all the people who come in expecting a rush of coolness only to find stagnant heat and then they say something stupid like “what, no air conditioner?” and you have to try and not bite their heads off
21. People who have to wear costumes as part of their job.  This is not so common in NYC but I’m told we have that racist guy who runs around Central Park in an Elmo costume…although, come to think of it, he sort of deserves to be hot and uncomfortable (thanks, Paul Haney!)
22. Anyone who has to work in a basement with no air flow with a lot of machinery which overheat to the point where when they walk outside they actually feel cooler (Paul Haney again!)

So, that’s the list.  Feeling thankful (for once) that the bar in which I work is The Most Air Conditioned Place Ever.

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Why Do People Cut Their Nails in Public?

28 Jun

So today I was reminded of one of my biggest pet peeves:  people cutting their nails in public places, most notably on the subway.  This afternoon I dragged my exhausted self into the city for an appointment with an extra large, extra caffeinated iced coffee in hand, while reading an article on Alzheimer’s research (for those of you wondering, any sort of progress towards a cure seems sort of hopeless at the moment).  I was really excited that the R train came right away and that, even though the N had passed on the express track while I was two stops away from Atlantic Avenue, when I arrived I found it waiting there with open doors, inviting me to enter. I hustled across the platform next to an equally excited woman who was eating pork rinds.  I settled into my seat, drinking my coffee, reading my magazine, generally feeling happy about my insane train luck and then I heard it.  Click, click, click.  I have this like, really keen sense of hearing when it comes to people clipping their nails.  I started looking around the car to find the culprit and there he was, a young man, probably in his 20s.  He was sitting next to his girlfriend, hunched over, shedding his nails all over the train floor.  Yuck.

Before I get a little more into this, let me just say that if my boyfriend were to start cutting his nails in public I would break up with him then and there.  That, to me, is a sign of a complete inability to discern that which is disgusting from that which is not disgusting and I do not want to date someone who thinks that doing something disgusting in public is normal.  To me, nails should only be cut when you are alone, in the bathroom, with your hand or foot dangling over the garbage can to try and catch as many errant nails as possible.  It is then important to sweep.  There is nothing worse than walking around the house, feeling a prick on the bottom of your foot and then discovering that someone elses nail is stuck into your skin.  A guy I used to date used to cut his nails on the coffee table while he watched TV, collect them into a neat pile and then deposit them into the ashtray.  I had to leave the room.

Anyway, sometimes I think that people who cut their nails in public literally follow me around.  I encounter one such person in the subway at least once a month.  When I was on my way to New Orleans in late February, the woman in front of me on the plane was cutting her nails.  One time I saw a cab driver cutting his toe nails (thankfully I was not in the cab at the time).  I have seen them on the bus, on the train platform, I have seen nail clippers dangling from key chains.  These people are everywhere.  They are everywhere and they are always cutting their nails.  Do their nails grow faster than other people’s?  Are there just thousands of people who find cutting their nails in public appropriate?  What is the thought process behind this?  Do these people simply not notice that their nails are long when they are in the privacy of their own homes?  Are their lives that busy that they have no choice but to cut in public?  And why in the world do they have nail clippers with them on the go anyway?  Of all the things I might think to throw in my bag, nail clippers are nowhere on the list.  And then you have to wonder, do public nail clippers do other yucky things in public as well? Do they floss out in the open?  Do they pick gunk out of their belly buttons while sitting at a red light? Do they pop zits at the dinner table?  These are all things that I wonder whenever I encounter a nail clipper out in the wild.  These are all the questions I silently asked myself as I suffered through the click, click, click of a public nail clipping event just this afternoon.

Seriously, one of these days when I am on the train and this happens, I am going to politely approach the offending individual and ask him or her why.  Either that or I am going to siddle up next to the person, snatch the clippers out of his or hand, and throw them violently across the train, taking care to not hit anyone in the head with them because that would hurt.  I will let you know how this goes.

As a final point, I would like to quote from my friend Mandy’s response to my Facebook posting about this very incident:

“The cutting of one’s nails in a public place should be condemned openly and publicly. It is revolting and I don’t understand why people don’t know this.”

Mandy, I could not agree more.

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What do I know from Yoops?

11 Apr

So today when I was walking east on 33rd Street towards my long, long, LONG overdue* waxing appointment I heard something weird.  I was walking by a hotel (or maybe a fancy apartment building?  But probably a hotel because who in their right mind would want to spend a lot of money to live like 2 blocks from Penn Station) and outside there were two door guys talking.  They were both definitely born and raised in New York City somewhere.  Anyway, they were in the midst of a very heated conversation when one of them says to the other,

“Well, I wanted to get yoops to pick up the package but then I called the guy and the guy said that it was probably FedEx that was doing it and not yoops.  I don’t know.  I told the guy I think yoops is better.”

Okay.  So as I walked away I started thinking about why it might be that this guy calls the company yoops rather than U.P.S. like the rest of us.  I came up with the following few possibilities:

1.  It’s like his cute little thing that he does.  Kind of like the way that I say “water” which, admittedly, is a little less choice and a little more accent (and not terribly cute) but still.  It’s like when someone says something about Carl and then you’re like “who’s Carl?” and they’re like “Oh, you know Carl.  He’s the one that says yoops” and at that moment you know exactly who Carl is.

2.  He doesn’t like acronyms and so therefore just doesn’t use them.  He’d be all “well, there was this debate up at the ‘un’-security council the other day” or “I wonder whether ‘who’ is going to approve that new drug for malaria” or “ohmgah! Did you see the new Carie Diaries?!”**

3.  Maybe he doesn’t realize that it is actually called UPS and at first all his friends and family thought that he was just making a joke and they kept letting him do it and then they realized that he was serious but they had been letting him make a fool of himself for this many years and they sort of feel like assholes pointing it out now.

4.  Maybe ‘yoops’ is actually a thing that people say but nobody ever told me about it.

So, yea, that’s it for today.  Other than the fact that I have Funkadelic’s “Freak of the Week” stuck in my head which, all things considered, isn’t so bad.

*You know it is overdue when your waxing lady, who you have been seeing regularly for the past 6 years, takes a look at you and goes, “Oh, Rebekah…”

**Apparently in my mind ‘Carl’ is simultaneously an international affairs student and a 15 year-old girl.

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Those Pre-Race Jitters

22 Feb

Tomorrow morning at 4:45am a car, driven by the awesome Leo, will come pick me up to take me to John F. Kennedy International Airport for my 6:50 flight to New Orleans.  I will arrive a few hours later in the Big Easy for my fourth time, and only the third time I’ll make the trip by plane.  At exactly this time last year I was leaving New York by car.  With me behind the wheel and two friends, a cat, a disco ball, and a life-size cardboard cutout of R2D2 taking up the backseat of a rental car with Tennessee plates (glad to avoid New York plates on a drive through the south!) we set off from New York City to New Orleans, by way of about a dozen different states, to set a friend up in her new apartment in her new city to start a new chapter of her life.  It was a fun ride followed by a fantastic few days of exploring a new town and then a great 13.1 miles through a city I knew I would be visiting yearly, if not more.  I had no expectations of that race considering I had spent the better part of the previous week either sitting in a car, sitting in a bar, or exploring every inch of New Orleans by foot.  It turned out better than I had expected.  It was my best time in a half marathon up until that point, my best time, that is, until I bettered it by almost 6 minutes about 3 months later in the Brooklyn Half on a gorgeous day in May.  2012 was my year (for running)!

As I was saying, tomorrow morning I will be en route to New Orleans, about 24 hours after I fell asleep this morning following an 8-hour shift behind the bar.  I will arrive in the city at around 9:30am to the expectant faces of two of my closest girlfriends — one of whom keeps an awesome blog and came in 4th among women in the New Orleans Marathon a few years back (and she didn’t even have a great race! Asthma attacks! Who does that?!) and the other who busies herself bartending, making jewelry, doing investigations, practicing Reiki, and trying to turn herself into a glitter unicorn, she is so close.  I’ll spend the day at the Marathon Expo and catching up with my girls before my third night of minimal sleep leads into a 13.1 mile run, once again through the streets of New Orleans.  I have to say, I am a little nervous.  As I sit here thinking about the upcoming race, I can’t help but focus on all the potential negatives. I can’t help but pressure myself a little bit to better my time from last year, to try and set another personal record.  But then there are those nagging concerns.  So now I am thinking if I mention them here, to you, I can release them and just go into the race with a clear mind the way I have entered all my other successful running experiences.  The way I have always managed to have the most fun.  So, here goes.

1.  My training has really not been the best.  As I think I might have mentioned in this post about a run I took with Ira Glass (sorta), I originally planned on running the full marathon.  I even got through a few 18-20 mile runs.  The thing was, none of them felt all that good.  There was always something.  Three colds; hands that wouldn’t warm up even when I stopped on the side of the road, crouched down on the floor and stuck them in my armpits (I did this, don’t mock me); hips that ached with every step.  All this happened, I know, because I was lazy about doing speed work and strength training.  Did I do something about it?  No, obviously not.  My last super long run was meant to be 20 miles long.  About 12 miles in, my body and my brain had had it.  I called it quits.  It was then that I decided to drop down to the half.  It was, overall, a bad training cycle.  Never the best thing to ease a mind.

2.  I bought new shoes and they hurt.  They are the same models as my old ones and, added bonus, they look really cool!  Bright blue and green!  You can see me from miles away!  My first few runs they felt good, albeit a little stiff, but that’s normal for Mizunos in my experience.  But then after an 8 mile run last week, when I was running the downhill stretch to my house, I felt this super uncomfortable feeling on my right ankle bump (learned that term in anatomy class).  It hurt!  And now it hurts every time I run in them.  It’s too late to buy new shoes so what do I do?  Risk injury by wearing a pair of shoes that already have about 300 miles too many on them or risk bruising the shit out of my ankle bump and having an uncomfortable race?  You’ll be able to find me stuck over there, right between a rock and a hard place.

3.  I think my period is about to start and I am pretty sure the heaviest day is going to be the day of the race.  I won’t go into that.  Just read about it here.

But then there are some really good things!

1.  My running friend, C, is probably going to run with me and we will talk through the whole thing, leading to a slower time but a higher quotient of fun!

2.  Music!  Brass bands!  Other kinds of bands!  All along the route!

3. Kara Goucher and Shalane Flanagan are running it.  C. and I plan on stalking them down and making them be friends with us.  And then we will all be buddies and we will run together, only Kara and Shalane will be fastest, C. will be almost keeping up with them, and I will be bringing up the rear with my hands in my armpits like an asshole but then we’ll all make jokes about it and it will be great.

4. After the race, regardless of my time, I will take a shower, wash my hair and then drink the biggest bloody mary that New Orleans has to offer.  I have very high expectations for this.

5.  For the glorious week following the race, I will not set foot behind a bar.  In a bar?  Yes.  At a bar?  Yes.  Behind a bar?  Oh, hell no.

6.  When I get back to New York on Saturday, March 2nd it is only 24 hours until the AT&T American Cup, the first big elite gymnastics meet of the 2013 season.  Don’t get me wrong, I could do without Tim Daggett, Elfi Schlegel,  Andrea Joyce, and Al Trautwig’s overuse of the words “catastrophic” and “phenomenal” and I will be writing a letter to NBC telling them to get rid of one of those clowns and hire Alicia Sacramone because she rocks.  Those things aside, I will watch that meet and I will love every second of it.

Oh, hey, look at that. Three bad things, six good things. And those were just the good things that went directly from brain to fingers to keyboard.  I bet I could even think of more if I didn’t have to start packing. (Fingers crossed I don’t forget something important like a sports bra.  That would go into the list of bad things.)  So, okay, my training didn’t go great, I’ll probably be bleeding and I have uncomfortable shoes.  People have run through worse.  I think it will be fine.  And if it isn’t?  I’ll just have to have TWO ginormous* bloody marys.

*Totally didn’t know that was actually a word.  Another wonderful addition by us Americans, no doubt

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The day I beat an ambulance by foot

1 Nov

On Tuesday evening, the day after Hurricane Sandy hit, I went for a run.  The subways were still out and I was dying to see Lower Manhattan without lights.  I hoofed the 3 miles over to the Brooklyn waterfront, seeing downed trees and scattered debris on every side street.  I reached as close to the water as the Parks Department would allow, stood on a big block, and just looked.  What a strange sight it was. The city that never sleeps, dark.

The following day I decided to take a different route.  I was interested to see what kind of damage had been done to Prospect Park, a place I have run through countless times in all kinds of weather.  My boyfriend pointed out that running through the park, what with all the severed branches and uprooted trees, was probably not the safest thing.  What if the wind blew and a branch fell?  What if a tree, already dangerously leaning, lost its last bit of support from the soil and toppled over?  I decided to run alongside it, glancing in every now and again to see how different it looked.  So, I set out.  I ran towards Atlantic Avenue, made a turn on Flatbush and started running uphill towards the park, dodging walkers and trick-or-treaters along the way.  The traffic was insane.  I had seen photographs of highways turned parking lots all over the East Coast.  I had, myself, taken a photograph near my house with cars lined up for miles in the middle of the day.  Who knows how long the rush hour drivers on Flatbush had been trying to get where ever they were going but I’m sure it was hours.  Then I heard it:  a siren.  I looked over my shoulder and saw an ambulance for New York Methodist hospital trying to make its way through the mess.  I kept running, expecting the ambulance to overtake me any second.  I figured people would pull their cars to the side, allowing space for the ambulance to get through.  Only, people didn’t.  I stopped and looked, the ambulance wasn’t really getting anywhere.  People were just sitting, stubbornly, not willing to give up their hard-earned space on the road, ignorant to the existence not only of the ambulance, but of the person requiring immediate medical care.  There was nothing for me to do, I kept running.  I got a few blocks further and realized that, again, the ambulance had not overtaken me.  A man driving a Senior Care ambulance turned on his lights, got out of his vehicle, and directed the Methodist ambulance through a busy intersection.  The ambulance, finally, passed me.  I started running again and quickly overtook it.  This happened several more times.  Me stopping at a light, the ambulance passing me, me getting the okay to go again, running up the hill, and easily passing the ambulance by foot.  It was heart breaking.  I could only imagine the frustration of the EMTs trying to get to their destination, and the anguish being felt by the family of whoever it was that needed such urgent care.  I couldn’t believe that, after what this city has been through, people were so concerned with getting where they were going that they were able and yet completely unwilling to allow the ambulance to pass.  It was crazy. I stood on a corner next to another woman, in shock.  We looked at one another and just shook our heads, she couldn’t believe it either.  I thought about whether there was anything I could do, tried to imagine myself directing traffic.  Every scenario I thought up ended in disaster, an even bigger traffic jam and me squashed in the middle of the road being cursed by angry drivers.  I continued on.   As I finished my run up Flatbush and saw the ambulance pass, only to get stuck in the mess that is Grand Army Plaza, I quietly voiced the hope that it could get where it was going on time and that none of my loved ones need urgent care over the next few days…they might not be able to get it.

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Riding the Subway, Living the Dream

8 Oct

Today I was sitting around thinking about my love/hate with the New York City public transportation system.  As any good New Yorker does, I have lots of complaints about the system’s shortcomings.  It runs slow basically all the time but especially when you’re in a rush.  Because of snow.  Because of rain.  Because it’s too hot.  Because someone didn’t drink enough water and passed out.  Because of train traffic ahead of us.  Because of a police investigation at 34th street.  Despite all the frustration some of my funniest, or at least most memorable, New York moments have happened on the subway. Let’s climb into the way-back machine and walk through my most favorite ever subway experience.

Thanksgiving weekend 2007. I was on the subway on my way to work the night shift at my bar.  It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving and I was weighed down with bags from spending a good 4-5 days at home in New Jersey.  I smelled something funny and looked over and saw a guy huddled in his seat eating what appeared to be heated up Thanksgiving leftovers.  Okay.  Not my most ideal venue for eating but whatever, that’s cool.  I went back to staring blankly through the window into the darkness of the subway tunnel.  All of a sudden I felt something small hit me.  Then again.  And again.  I looked down at the floor and saw, rolling around, a few green peas.  I turned around and saw that the man with the leftovers was sitting there, staring at me, holding a plastic spoon in his hand and methodically launching his overcooked peas at me across the near-empty train car.  I was stunned.  I looked around, trying to see if anyone else had (a) been the victim of assault by pea or (2) had seen what was happening and could give me some clue as to the best way to respond because this guy was clearly a little looney.  No one seemed to have noticed.  I got hit in the forehead with another pea.  I said, loudly, and to no one in particular

Hello?  Anyone?  Does anyone see what is happening here?

An older lady who I had previously thought was sleeping lifted her head ever so slowly, looked at me, looked at the man, looked back at me and said, calmly,

He’s flicking peas.

I threw my hands up in the air, sending a pea that had gone unnoticed on my shoulder tumbling to the floor.

Yes! Exactly!  He is flicking peas!

And then, at a loss of what to do I looked back at the window, catching the man’s reflection in the darkness and watching to see when he might launch his next attack. My stop couldn’t come soon enough.  I grabbed my bags, looked over my shoulder in utter disbelief, and hustled off to my job.  I arrived at work a few moments later, anxiously awaiting the opportunity to share my experience.  I greeted my co-worker, wished her a happen belated Thanksgiving.  She smiled for a second and then screwed up her mouth and said,

Um…what is in your hair?

Clearly, it was a pea, nestled safely into one of my braids.

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Running in a Type A City

6 Aug

One of the things about New York is that we have the best of the best here.  I’m not saying that we have all the best people in the world but that, in almost any walk  of life, any academic or athletic pursuit, basically anything at all, we have some highly talented people and, unless you know someone or are really good at whatever it is you do, you will have a hard time competing.  For an example just look at our women’s roller derby team, The Gotham Girls, who routinely trounce all their competition.  As a person who considers herself to be more or less average — although I did just manage to accomplish a feat I never thought possible:  I cut my forearm on a not-very-sharp table corner because I was mindlessly leaning on it while reading pointless articles about women’s gymnastics on the internet rather than working on my thesis — New York could, potentially, be frustrating and disheartening.  Luckily for me, I am not Type A.  Not even close.  I am a steady-goes it, low-stress, often-running-late kind of a gal.  And, honestly, I like it that way.  What I do not like, however, is when my blissful Type B day gets invaded by some Type A nutjob in running shorts.  And now, story time.

This morning I did what I do most mornings (or afternoons, depending on the amount of farting around I engage in):  I laced up my running shoes.  I then proceeded to waste about 1/2 hour, meandering around the house, complaining to no one in particular about how hungry I was.  Once that ritual was completed, I headed out the door for my loop around the park.*  Up I went, following my normal path.  Over and up, over and up.  I got onto the main running road and assumed my slower-than-normal pace because, due to my new and theoretically better plan which is explained in the below asterisked portion of the post, I have become significantly less fit.  No matter.  At some point either approaching or ascending The Big Hill I came upon a man in his mid-60’s.  I approached him from behind, breathing more heavily than normal, and assumed I would just cruise by him.  But no.  He sped up.  I hate when people do that.  Whatever.  I didn’t let it bother me.  At the top of The Big Hill I decided to give the man some space so my running experience wouldn’t be negatively impacted.  I pulled over next to a tree to stretch.  I was joined, moments later, by a friendly speed-walker who, when I greeted her, dazzled me with a thick accent reserved for Jewish people born and raised in New York City.  We chatted for a minute or two, I wished her a good walk and carried on.  Not too much later I caught back up with the older man.  Clearly, he had fallen off the pace he had earlier assumed in order to not allow me to easily pass him on The Big Hill.  I chuckled to myself.  As I approached him for the second time that day he did the thing I hoped he wouldn’t do but which I knew deep down he absolutely would do:  he sped up.  Ugh.  Annoying.  As we covered the final .8 miles of the park loop, the man kept slowing down to the point where I’d come up over his left shoulder and then, when his Type A Spidey Sense alerted him he was about to be caught and passed by a girl with boobs and hair, he sped up again.  So I decided to do what any normal person would do:  I controlled my breathing and pushed the pace because you know what?  If he is going to get all competitive and annoying and take the fun out of my run, then I am going to make him want to vomit by forcing him to run faster than he is comfortable doing.  So, slowly but surely I continued to speed up.  He followed suit.  When I came up to the final 100 meters of the run, more or less, I decided to do what I often do, sprint to the finish and, wouldn’t you know it, he started racing me.  I mean, really?  Rather than stew in sweaty silence I called out to him

Is it really that important to out sprint me?  Do you feel good now?  Thanks for ruining my run, jerk.

He looked over his shoulder with a scowl that expressed anger, embarrassment, and shock.  I had called him out on his poor Type A behavior and he was not happy about it.  I ran home, feeling less cleansed than usual from my running experience.  Damnit.

But seriously, this sort of thing happens all the time and, I would like to point out, the annoying party is always male.  Always.  Never do women seem insulted by being passed by a runner who is (A) faster (B) having a random really awesome running day or (C) doing some sort of a tempo run.  So I want to say to all you Type A runners out there, please leave me be.  I am out there running not to be faster than everyone else in the park, but to have fun and clear my mind.  Running is the one hobby in my life that has been a constant for me.  I have picked up and dropped so many other activities — trumpet, tennis, gymnastics — but, for whatever reason, this is the one that has stuck. I love it because I can do it in my own time and on my own schedule.  I love it because it’s something that I do just for me, not to be better than anyone else, not for bragging rights, just for my own happiness.  And I love it because it allows me a small bit of time to be outdoors without a huge, heavy shoulder bag, more or less alone.  So please, please, if you see me running, don’t try and out run me.  Don’t try to prove to me that you’re faster.  Honestly, I could care less.  All I ask is that you let me continue, unchallenged, doing what I love doing.  Just let me run.

And one last thing.  Get a life.

*Recently I decided that I would try and run just one loop around the park, about 5 1/2-5 3/4 miles, 6 days a week rather than put pressure on myself to run more miles slightly less often, thereby lessening the pressure quotient and making running more fun.  Pressure takes the fun out of things for me.  The problem, however, is now I have put pressure on myself to run 6 days a week, which effectively dissuades me from actually running those 6 days, resulting in less weekly mileage and more difficult (read: less enjoyable) sometimes-daily runs.  I think I need a new, pressure and commitment free, plan.

 

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