cabbage patch the sorcerer

faces 4

faces 3

faces 2

faces 1

it's way too late in the day for me to be drinking coffee

with twitter on the verge of collapse

I warmly welcome everyone back to blogger

your boy knows how to pick a horse

Haven't posted since the pancake incident

my burn marks peeled off so that's nice

I flipped a pancake and hot oil splattered on my face

super mega pop bulbous tricked out fury bop bop good

irony and sarcasm are dead

 not trying to pretend this is in any way new but I think it's worth repeating. There's no difference between someone pretending to be awful on purpose and an awful person anymore. 

We have to either be silly and/or nice and/or sincere. Those are the only options. 100% genuine. 

Instagram would show me these clips from SNL of Colin Jost and Michael Che reading jokes they'd written for each other that they would have to read live for the first time on-air. And so Michael Che would make all the jokes Colin had to read really racist. It's funny because Colin is so embarrassed and humiliated by saying all these awful things.

But then you go to the comments and every comment, I mean, every comment, is:

"finally SNL is funny" 

"finally telling good jokes again"

"I wish this was the whole show"

"this is the only good part of the show"

And they're just saying they like racist humor. Like, instead of laughing at the idea of saying a horrible thing, they're laughing at a racist joke they find funny that's been couched in the safety of sarcasm. Right? Like you can't be pretend-racist if there are people who find the racism itself funny. 

slightly related but also a tanget---

My personal mission at camp is to strike down swiftly anytime someone gives a direction and then someone responds by just saying the opposite of the direction.

"and no one wants to go in a gross messy bathroom"

"yes we do"

Oh my gosh the righteous force that will descend upon you when you utter these words. My eyes go white and I appear just over your shoulder and you see my mouth moving but you don't hear a sound, you only the voice in your head

you think that's funny? the most knee-jerk lazy response of just saying the opposite of what someone just said? don't do that. no one is impressed. no one is glad you said the most thoughtless lazy possible thing. use your brain. say something productive.

I'm exaggerating of course but in my experience, nothing poisons the well faster head-empty defiance. It's like, what are you trying to say about yourself? What's your intention?

That you don't care? That you can't be bothered? Who would want to spend time with someone like that? 

I do get that there's an inherent appeal in being defiant. Like it's cool on a surface level to reject something outright. That's the core of the appeal of like, an anti-hero or villain. And yeah some rules are lame and authority should not be accepted blindly. 

So what's the motivation? Why should you not be a turd every time you get the chance? To avoid getting in trouble? Trouble is a stupid concept and we worry about it too much. I think the quiet, long-term consequence is that you won't have good friends and people won't want to be around you. And you'll be caught in this cycle where the only attention you get is negative attention and that pushes people away more. And it's really real. You see it all the time and it's a big problem especially in early adolescence. 

To make everything more complicated, there are communities where social interaction is centered around saying and doing outlandish, horrible things and it becomes really easy to dismiss any argument that you're isolating yourself when you feel part of a group of people. In my experience though it's like drinking seawater. It can't sustain you long term because it's not based on compassion or understanding or anything that makes someone a person. The world is messy and chaotic and there truly are no rulebooks to the world, only outcomes. But, on an individual level, as a peoples, as a humans, we are fundamentally squishy and need things like affection and warmth. That's like

that's like

that's like the essential thing, the unspeakable truth, the that-which-not-cannot-be-said, that all the sarcasm and edginess and angst and defiance is trying to obscure. We can't stand the thought of asking for acceptance and affection and safety and being rejected. It's too painful to even consider. And so we have to pretend, we have to engage in this elaborate theater where we roleplay as moody broody little main characters pitted against the world to cover up the secret that we're just a squishy lil guy who wants nice little pets. 

you like krabby patties, don't you squidward?

goal for the week: 30 sub 6 min miles

really happy with how much rest I got this weekend. Very much needed. I bought some new running shoes and am feeling super motivated. Except for Tuesday the weather should be good. 

Tomorrow is 2x4 miles with 2 min rest. keeping it right around 5:50 pace. Should be great!

call that a dinosaur

 dinosaur between graham crackers and chocolate: dinos'more

dinosaur talks too much about nothing: dinobore

fill the bottom of your house with old bones: call that a dinofloor

just add dino to the front of any word that rhymes with -saur

if you combined a yogurt with a goblin

 would that be a gobgurt or a yoglin?

Inventing another game

 word assassins. It's like the regular game of assassins except instead of marking someone with a marker, you're trying to get them to say a secret word that they don't know. if they say the word out loud you present them with the piece of paper that had their name on it and the word and they're out of the game. you then acquire their target.

I'm going to invent a game

 it's called 1,000 knights

there's two kingdoms, each with an army of 1,000 knights and they're going to meet on the battlefield and have it out. So there's two teams and they're each trying to decide the proper number of soldiers to bring to the battle. If you send too few then you risk being overwhelmed. If you send too many then you risk stretching your troops too thin and leaving yourself vulnerable to other attacks and such. So a third, impartial player decides a number between 1 and 1,000 and the other two teams are trying to determine what that number could be. 

The only hint the teams get is a completely opaque and non-sequitur clue/sentence provided by the judge. 

So the number could be something like 521 and the judge could say something like "It was compulsory to use coconut shells to make horse trotting noises." And the game is you make up a really tenuous reason why that's a hint. So you could say "compulsory" means "have to" which can sound like "hafta" which sounds like "half" and also you would use two halves a coconut to make the noise so the guess is probably somewhere around half of a 1,000. 

And maybe there's also something where each person gets to ask an open-ended, equally opaque question to try to figure something out.

Whichever team is closer to the correct number wins the round and battle.

having to do something versus wanting to do something

 It's probably a pretty traumatic experience in someone's life when they come to terms with the fact that there are things they HAVE to do. Agency is really precious and I value it more than most things and having to give it up for reasons you might not even understand or agree with is pretty awful. But, learning how to survive and get by in situations you have to be in is a really valuable skill and a large part of what we consider being a socialized person. 

But something I've realized in coaching is that I think people, kids specifically, are sometimes so deeply in the mindset of "having to do things" and "coping with being in a situation that I'm not in control of" that they don't seem to understand how to act when they're in an environment that people want to be in. 

As someone who works with kids, it's so easy to fall into the trap of seeing a kid show signs of defiance and resistance and then trying to get them to comply. That's definitely a learned role on both sides. I've been trying to take the approach of not forcing anyone to do anything and modeling and focusing on what it looks like when you actively want to do something. My worry is that there's so much that we feel we have to do that we might not realize or ever get the chance to cultivate something we actually want to do. 

do your best

 run 10 miles

eat a billion eggs

knit a blanket sweater

sweat into a bucket

ghost form ghost form

always do your best

relate to the masses

have a balloon in your hand

in the echoes of eternity we are riffs of frazzled sparkle

Running for the upcoming week

 busy week coming up. I did a hike with camp today and will do a longer run with 7 faster miles tomorrow. Then Monday and Tuesday I'll be working all day with camp and coaching so I'll be running in the evening. I think I'll try to stay focused and keep my schedule as normal as possible. It really shouldn't be that hard. Just two days. 

I was looking back at my 10 miler splits from 2017 and they're a little scary to look at now. It's hard to believe I ran that fast. But, at the same time, I definitely did and there's nothing preventing me from getting back there again. I feel really confident in my training and I'm excited that I'm intentionally training my aerobic development in a new way. It won't happen all at once--slowly but surely I'll get faster though and get close to where I was 5 years ago. 

You gotta be excited about what you're doing. You gotta be excited about what you can make of the day. You can choose that and you can do things to make it true. This is me doing that.

brain has felt foggy since like Saturday

finally feels better today

spooky man

taken from a top Todd’s roof

pumped-kin tom

Feeling Tired

 I've been doing a lot and I think my body is telling me I need to rest more. I'm gonna try to take tomorrow really slow. My throat has been sore for a few days but I think even more than that I need a lot of rest and recovery between running and climbing. Also maybe drinking more water.

But everything is still going well. These are probably just some early warning signs to slow down a little.