Happy International Women’s Day! I recall organizing a panel on the ethics of care with Joan Tronto — at least, I think I’m remembering that right — back in 2010.
march 8, 2017 / bike / front room
This entry comes just weeks before I took a poetry class at the Loft and my life was changed. In it, I write about watching endurance races — ASICS Running: Beat the Sun and Ironman Kona — and contrast the “sappy” stories of the packaged/condensed coverage of KONA with the “real” moments of the race in Beat the Sun. After explaining that I like the sappy Kona stories about 70 year-old nuns and father-and-son teams and recently paralyzed pros returning, even if they are designed to make me cry, I describe a moment in Beat the Sun:
. . . there’s a moment in the show that made me feel something deeper than I’ve ever felt in the dozen or so KONA videos I’ve watched. A little over 19 minutes in, the camera focuses on a runner who has just finished his grueling segment. He’s wheezing and having trouble breathing. We watch him wheeze for 10 seconds, which seems like a long time. Finally, he recovers. He walks off and calls out “I need a hug.” I’ve wheezed like that after a race. I know how it feels to not be able to breathe, to panic, worrying that you might pass out. I hate that feeling. I’ve watched the clip several times now and every time, I feel my throat closing up.
I started this project because I was fascinated by the genre of running blogs, mostly by individuals who “never ran as a kid” but discovered running later in life. I wanted to study those stories and to write one myself that experimented/played/challenged the formula. Here’s how I concluded the entry:
I don’t have a neat conclusion to offer to this entry, but I feel like I’m getting at something bigger with my discussion of sappy stories, personal narratives, feel-good moments and orchestrated versus authentic. Part of what this run! story project is about is experimenting with how to authentically communicate my experiences training and running. How do I express what it feels like to be running in a way that moves others and/or enables them to understand who I am in all my complexity, beyond the trite clichés of “the runner” and the formulaic running stories and race reports?
When I discovered poetry, my project transformed. I began writing more about my vision loss and poetry and noticing the world, learning how to live in it in different ways.
march 8, 2020 / 3.25 miles / 50 degrees
Tick tock tick tock. In two days I will have (almost) a panic attack in the basement over not being able to breathe fully and having COVID-like symptoms just as COVID is hitting. Did I have COVID? Maybe a very mild version. In 6 days, everything will shut down.
In this entry, I write about Mary Oliver and the idea of the Mississippi River Gorge as the schoolhouse or lab where I’m learning how to be. I love this idea and want to develop it more — should I work on it today (march 8, 2024?).
3 MO Poems about School:
- Breakage/ Mary Oliver
- Just as the Calendar Begins to Say Summer/ Mary Oliver
- Mindful/ Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver hated school as a child. I read in her memoir, Upstream, that the only thing she was good at doing in school was being truant.
Mary Oliver is more radical than some people realize; she’s writing about more than being mindful or paying attention. She’s rejecting/resisting/challenge larger systems, the machines of capitalism and war, and the schooling that trains us to believe in them:
I went out of the schoolhouse fast
and through the gardens and to the woods,
and spent all summer forgetting what I’d been taught–
two times two, and diligence, and so forth,
how to be modest and useful, and how to succeed and so forth,
machines and oil and plastic and money and so forth.
Yesterday (march 7, 2024), I mentioned Paul Goodman in my entry. I referenced an old TROUBLE blog post and this quote from Goodman:
The entire effort of serious educators ought to be to explore and invent other ways of educating than these schools, to suit the varieties of talent and to meet the needs of a peaceful future society where there will be emphasis on public goods rather than private gadgets, where there will be increasingly more employment in human services rather than mass-production, a community-centered leisure, an authentic rather than a mass-culture, and a citizenry with initiative rather than one increasingly bureaucratized and brainwashed.
Why Go to School?/ Paul Goodman
I see some great connections between MO and Goodman here about the limits of school.