Miranda Lambert

We were supposed to go to the concert in Lexington scheduled in January, but it was one of the concerts rescheduled after her father-in-law passed away.

Because the reschedule also involved a day change (Friday to Sunday) I was faced with a difficult decision - cancel the trip with my three non-LDS teenaged cousins for whom I bought the tickets as a Christmas present so that I could be letter-of-the-law sabbath worthy, or suck it up and realize that sometimes there are more important things and that imposing my beliefs on them would be not only unproductive but probably detrimental. We came up with a compromise: originally the plan was to drive down the day before, spend the night and do lots of ice cream and pasta eating, movie watching, and running around UK campus with my cousin who's a student there, then go to the concert. Instead, we drove down and back in the same day so that I could still teach my 12- and 13-year-old kids.

The girls met me at my aunt's house after I was done at church so that we could drive down to the concert last night, and we had an absolute blast! I LOVE Miranda Lambert. She's honest about who she is, she doesn't ascribe to the I'm-gonna-be-anorexic-to-reach-size 2 philosophy that's so prevalent, she plays the guitar for most of her songs (and they're in multiple keys, unlike another twit of a country pop-tart), and she sings songs that speak to my heart. And she says things like "Where I come from, it is never okay for a man to beat up on a woman" in response to our society's rewarding of Chris Brown and his escapades (why on earth do we give him prizes and money for singing about such doings? It is incomprehensible to me). I love that she's outspoken about it.

And no, she's not a man-hater. Last night at the concert she must've mentioned her (extremely handsome - that's my addition, though I think she said it too) husband that she's just cute-newlywed-in-love with 15 times. It was adorable. A lot of her songs are really strong in terms of the way they respond to the idea of men who mistreat women, but she also sings really sweet, lovey songs. This one in particular I could sing to Ben and it's pretty spot-on explanation of how I feel about him - especially the "I'll always call YOU home" part. I like the balance between "stand up for yourself" and "a good relationship can be really satisfying". Her music makes me happy! And it's great for running hills, but that's an entirely different element. :-)

I had three favorite parts about the night. The first was my sweet 13-year-old cousin that hadn't ever been to a concert before - the other two dressed her up, we went out to eat at a fun pizza place, and she just had a great time - I don't think I've ever seen her so excited about anything! The second was talking in the car on the way down and back with my 18-year-old cousin....she and I aren't the closest from the group. It was fun.

The third though, had to have been the all-time best. We had all been sort of wishful-thinking-hoping that she'd have the Pistol Annies along, but there was nothing on the concert site about it so we didn't think it would actually happen. Surprise surprise, they came! We all screamed. Better harmonies than I've heard in years. I like Ashley Monroe's voice a whole lot. The three of them together, though......so old school.

Pretty much the best time I've had in years, totally worth the sleep deprivation leftovers today. :-)

'Nuther trail race

I'm starting to be an addict, I think. Like seeking out bigger and better highs kind of addict. At least it's naturally produced, though......all from in my body.

Anyway.

I've not run a trail race this long since September of 2010. So it felt good to do it. The course was really nice - single-track loop - though the weather was ridiculous! We've had weather in the 50s all week long, until last night when it got cold and freezie enough to snow about a 1/2 inch. Today it was 30 with a decent wind - I regretted forgetting my chapstick and clean socks but when I realized I didn't have them I was already 10 minutes from home. With an hour-long drive, it just wasn't practical to back-track.

I surprised myself with my finish today. I was just going for a "completed it"-type finish, and I did a lot better than that. This race was a full mile longer than my previous trail half PR, but I kept the same pace. That surprised me, because I was running much more consistently then than I am now. I guess there's something to being trained up and then maintaining, rather than working up to a distance. And I beat everyone in my age group but one - which is always a validating feeling. You totally can't see it in the picture, but we were all completely mud-covered. Mostly up the back, of course, but still respectably dirty. If I weren't so tired I'd post a picture of my socks....they tell the whole story!

The coolest thing I saw today was a 12-year-old boy that ran with his Dad. They passed me at mile 9-ish and I was pretty sure they were going to beat me. I ended up catching them again in the last mile or so though. He was a super-cool kid, and running behind him for a while made me wish for 12-year-old balance and ankles....he FLEW through little up-down ravine dips, despite mud. It was awesome. Bee is really interested in running (at almost-6 she can run an 11-minute mile, not bad at all), I would love to the the 38-year-old dad running with his son - only me and Bee. It would be awesome. So seeing them gave me some hope for fun to come, even when I'm old!

You keep using that word....

.....I do not think it means what you think it means.

IN Rep. Bob Morris has issued a statement condemning the Girl Scouts of America because of their attempts to "sexualize" young girls. And maybe he's onto something - this girl is pretty tarted up, after all.

Though there is a mingled mixture of indecision in his statement where he can't seem to completely say that the GSA is an awful organization (at one point he says that "The Girl Scouts of America stand in a strong tradition that reflects with fidelity the traditional values of our homes and our families. The tradition extends from coast-to-coast and back through the past one hundred years."), the overwhelming majority of the statement casts GSA as attempting to turn good little girls into "feminists, lesbians, and communists."

Now, when I think of sexualizing young girls, I think of problematic things like this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this.

Get the idea? Surprised by all the examples? Frightened? Worried? Appalled?

Anyway.

Based on what I read in Rep. Morris' statement, his concerns about the GSA don't have anything to do with actual sexualization of young girls, though he uses the word repeatedly. He's worried that the GSA is *gasp* teaching girls about sex! And even including references to that ever-so-threatening-to-conservatives-bunch-of-baby-killers Planned Parenthood. Rep. Morris is concerned that your little girls might have sex because of what they learn in Girl Scouts.

Can I point out that they're likely to have friends pandering much worse messages than anything GSA says about sex? Friends that encourage them to have sex with boys because that's the way that girls have power over boys? Or friends that encourage them to have unprotected sex because it's "cooler" and "real"? Or friends that convince them that the sex they're having (ie oral sex) isn't real sex because it's not vaginal penetration?

I'm way more worried about the future Queen Bee girls in my little one's life, than I am about what Rep. Morris calls the GSA's sexualization of American girls and young women. In fact, I think that the sex ed my kids get at home will have more common points with the GSA version of things than the "Sex is bad", "gays are evil", abstinence-only approach that Rep. Morris is calling for.

Procrastination

I have officially rotted my brain on the internet for as long as I can stand it. It is therefore time to begin the inevitable task of grading exam compositions.

With any luck, maybe I'll finish them before I have a new batch (of 96 straight compositions) come in - a little less than 48 hours from now.

* sigh *

Spouse-imony

So, in all fairness I have to admit that I stole this title from another blog. But I thought it was hilarious, because of how many "testimonies" are filled with "I love my family and they're just the best"-type thoughts. Anyway. If I wait until Father's Day to do this, it just won't be surprising. And if I wait until Ben's birthday, well, then I'd be tempted to let it be his birthday present (which would be lame). Randomly, then, here's my testimony of Ben. :-)

Ben is one of the most persistent people I've ever known. The most blatant example of this would be summed up by our time dating....I'd already been on a date with one of his brothers, and had determined (because in my teenaged wisdom a personality that I disliked would be common to all siblings) to never repeat the experience under any circumstance, with any of the boys in his family (that's another story). Ben quietly persisted, but not in an annoying way. He liked my family and the place where we lived (I mean, who wouldn't, 40 acres of trees, garden, orchard and creek!), so he found a way to hang out from time to time. I muddled along on my way trying my best to ignore him, but gradually realized what a good kid he was (he was 16, I was 17). He was honest when my siblings asked him hard questions about how the world works, but never abrupt about negative things. I liked that a lot. And he continually found things that would interest me, without asking me about them. He's very perceptive. After a year or so, I finally decided that it might be a good thing to go on a date with him, and the rest is history.

The other thing about our "courtship" (if you can call it that, it was really more just the time between when I came to my senses and when we got married) was that it took a long time, and we were very frequently separated by inconvenient distance. Ben was so patient about that, I think his level of devotion is pretty unique (but maybe I just flatter myself). I never worried about it, because we kept in contact with letters and phone calls. When I was at BYU he was home, when he was at BYU I was home, we had one semester together and then I left on a study abroad. While I was gone he left on his mission, and I left on mine before he got home. During the year or so that he had at home while I was on my mission, he dropped an occasional letter but with NOTHING romantic until the very last one he sent, which I received about 4 days before I was set to come home. And oh boy was THAT one a doozy....my companion loved it, she couldn't believe that I wasn't already planning a wedding. Ben's a great letter writer. As it played out, I was just grateful that he was completely supportive of me on my mission, and because we hadn't made any sort of "I'll wait for you" promise, there was no pressure. I think he was more sure that we should get married than I was, but he never let on at the time. And he certainly didn't do that "I've received revelation that you're supposed to marry me!" garbage. I've not met many men who are secure enough in themselves to say "This is what I want, and I'm going to work to make it happen. If she chooses otherwise, I guess I'll just figure something out!"

We got married in the Nauvoo temple. Ben's family didn't particularly like that idea, mostly because of a family tradition of getting married in Washington, D.C. It would have been all well and good to keep with the tradition, except that my parents were married there. My divorced parents. I could only imagine how uncomfortable the whole thing would be for my parents and their spouses no matter what we did, let alone if we somehow ended up in the same sealing room where they had been. Anyway. Ben was completely supportive, and as I remember it Nauvoo was his idea to begin with. We both had emotional reasons for feeling attached to Nauvoo, and I thought his consideration for me and my family, enough to break a family tradition on his part, was amazing. He continually shows that kind of careful consideration for other people, even at times when I don't notice a need for it. Again, just amazingly perceptive.

After we got married and I finished my student teaching, Ben still had two years of school to finish (changing majors versus knowing what you want to study and completing two summer terms will create that sort of disparity!). Since Ohio requires a master's degree after a certain time teaching, I decided to just go ahead and knock it out while Ben was in school. We had our first baby at the end of my first year, and from that point on I really got to see Ben's selflessness and supportiveness. We shuffled schedules so we never had to leave her in daycare (though she did spend 20 minutes at a time with AL and Vanessa a couple times a week! Love you guys...), and Ben held my hand through the woes of early breastfeeding (and then was supportive when I didn't feel the need to drape myself in a blanket-tent every time I nursed).

I've said before and I'll say again that there's a huge difference between a verbally supportive husband ("Sure, honey, it would be GREAT if you get a PhD. You have an exam tomorrow? Good luck. What time do you think you'll have dinner ready? Oh, and did you iron that shirt for me?) and an actually supportive husband ("Hey, you've been rocking and carrying the colicky baby for a couple hours now. How about I take her so you can get your reading done?"). Ben is absolutely supportive. Not just ideologically, but practically. I love seeing the way we share work....the kids are just up for grabs, we figure that out case by case. Generally I do most of the shopping, cleaning, cooking, laundry, and gardening (in the summer) and Ben does the dishes, cleanup, and settling the house for bed. But during weeks that I'm overloaded, he just picks up the slack, wherever it happens to be. It works great, and I love him for it! In the course of our whole marriage I've never heard a "Hey, where's dinner"- or "How come my shirt isn't clean"-type comment. And the few times when he comes home to a mess, he infers that the kids have been monstrous, and rather than say anything just scoops them up and swoops them away to play - either in their rooms or at the park, so that I can get my feet under me again.

Getting a PhD was never in my plans. Not in a million years. For one, because I thought there was no way I could be a professor and be a good mom (how I thought high school teaching would be any better, I have NO idea). Then I met Valerie. Which is just another post entirely. In a nutshell, though, she flew in the face of all of my assumptions about working and mothering. And she helped me see (convinced me?) that I was smart. I talked to Ben about it, and we jumped in with both feet. More shuffling of schedules, more compromising on who did what, mixing his master's work with my PhD courses....and still somehow we managed. I think the only reason we survived it was because our Heavenly Parents thought we were on the right track and helped push us along.

My favorite Ben story was from the period after our second baby was born, when I was reading for my qualifying exams. I was sleep deprived because of teaching, reading, and nursing a newborn. Baby J was about 9 months old at that point, and didn't need to nurse at night any more. But it was the easy out! I could nurse him for 10 minutes and plunk him back in bed, or walk the floor for two hours. One night it was just too much, and Ben woke up to me sobbing in bed next to him while nursing because literally 5 minutes after I put my books and notes away, the baby woke up. Ben looked at me and said "Why are you doing this? He doesn't need to nurse." I about lost it, until he said "When he does this, wake me up. I'll get up with him. You need to sleep." I could hear the "or you're not going to make it" that he was kind enough not to articulate.

We survived. I think a lot of the survival credit goes to Ben, because he helps me keep an even keel. He makes time for me to run, he spends more time with his kids than a lot of moms do (which for an LDS man is somewhat exceptional), he cooks, he cleans, he sees what I've not managed and gets it done. Without asking me, or waiting for me to ask him. For me, that's what equal partnering is about - finding the strengths you both have and combining them to move forward, working around each others' weak spots.

Ben's also a good feminist. He hates when I say that because of the negative connotations that the word has for some people. But there's really not another good one - personist? Humanist? Neither works. Here's a story to illustrate what I mean. Recently when they called me to be the camp director for the ward (HOORAY! I'm so excited), the second counselor asked Ben's permission first. Ben said "Why are you asking me?" and the counselor said something about needing to know that Ben would support me. Ben responded that of course he'd support me, provided I wanted to accept the calling, and that they'd have to ask me. I love it! He finds a quiet, non-abrasive way to say "You know, really, I'm not going to give my permission, but I'll tell you that I'll help her to do it if it's what she wants to do." The idea that I would need his consent for anything is pretty ridiculous, and he recognizes it as such, and then does something about it! He continually surprises me.

The last thing that I love is maybe what I love most. Ben's a great dreamer. And he's good at framing the dreams as things that we can actually do, then my obsessive planner nature kicks in and we work on getting there. We've always had in mind an idea of what we want to do....move out to the country and largely self-support, mixing jobs in for as long as the lifestyle we have now holds out. Step by step we're doing it. And I'm so excited to see that it can be done - when you paint a castle in the sky, it can look like a farmhouse, and you can have some hope of ending up in it! I love it.

I love Ben for his love of nature, his perceptive nature and tendency to nurture, his willingness to share an opinion with me that differs from mine without condescension, the way he loves his children, and the goodness with which he treats me. We've had rough patches for sure....neither of us is perfect of course, and some of the imperfections can be pretty glaring. But like Ben told me last night, "Help me love the people that choose to sin differently than I do" is a good attitude to encourage tolerance. When I met him I knew he was a good kid, and he's definitely grown into a good man; but even when I married him I had no idea just how good. He's pretty amazing.

I'm so glad that he's a part of my life, and I'm excited to see what we'll get into next!! And wow, I think this is the longest post I've ever put up.

There must be something wrong with me

When I bounced out the door for my "short" run today (the short runs are 5 miles these days....hooray for training for a half!), I realized it was snowing.

I started to giggle and turned up my music.

Then when I got to the neighborhood hill where I do reps, I realized that it was easier (at least in terms of the snow blowing into my eyes) to run up the hill than down. So I decided to run 4 reps instead of 2.

I guess I'm officially not a fairweather runner. :-)

YW v SS

I taught two lessons yesterday. One for my calling, another because I was subbing.

The YW lesson that I taught absolutely flabbergasted me. The title was "Finding Joy in our Divine Potential." I was excited. Then I read the lesson.

The first line said this:
"Invite an exemplary sister (preferably one who has married in the temple and has a family), who has been approved by priesthood advisers, to speak to the young women about the joy of being a woman."

The rest continued in the same vein.

And there was not a single scripture to share included in the lesson materials (unless you count the ones referenced in a letter from the general YW presidency, but they weren't part of the "lesson development").

The SS lesson was titled "What Happens After Death?" and was full of scripture references to discuss. There was a cautionary note about avoiding speculation and supernatural stories (Yeah, didn't need that, I'm fully aware of the tendencies of 12- and 13-year-old boys!). :-)

So, the contrast between the two is striking (make sure we give scriptures to the boys, just make it up as we go for the girls; the idea of "approving" a woman because she's temple-married and has children). Those issues aside, the thing that makes me laugh is that for all intents and purposes, judging just on outward appearances I could be that "exemplary woman" that they suggest you bring in. I graduated seminary, went to BYU, got married in the temple to a returned missionary, have young kids that wear matching outfits to church as often as not (just kidding...well, sort of), pay tithing, read my scriptures, do visiting teaching and compassionate service, attend church, accept and fulfill callings....you know, all that jazz. But if I had been the "guest speaker" instead of the teacher, you can bet that only 5 of my 20 minutes would have talked about motherhood as a joy in my life. It is; but it's not alone. Probably not what they had in mind, since the thrust of the entire lesson was mothering. Maybe that's why there were no scriptures given - finding scriptural basis for the motherhood = a woman's divine potential is pretty sketchy. Speculation and unofficial statements are the majority of it.

As it went, I ended up spending my portion of the lesson talking about the sources/root words of "divine" and "potential," and talked about how divinity = God and Heavenly Mother, and potential = power/ability and the idea of becoming. Ability to have divine attributes. That sort of thing.

The girls liked the lesson. So did I.

Insult

Today I went trail running. And it was oh-so-heavenly!! I ran 8 miles in 1:25:and some (didn't wear a watch, just timed with my phone)...it's 20 degrees, 18mph winds, snowed about 2 inches last night. Crispy and COLD! I was fine until the last mile or so, at which point I was running directly into the wind up on a ridge (well, other than the three steep up-down climbs that gave me some respite). My face felt like it was gonna be numb for the rest of my life. Beautiful! I just might be ready for another half here in a bit.

Anyway.

When I run the trail system that this 8-miler (the trail itself is only 6.8 miles, but I start from my in-laws' house, which is .5 miles from the trailhead) is part of, I frequently run into troops of Boy Scouts (and their leaders, bless their hearts - in the Miranda Lambert sense of that expression...about 40 seconds into the song, if you follow the link) on the shorter loops off the end and middle of the long loop I run. Very rarely, I find a troop out on the stretch that's only the 6.8 mile trail.

Frequently, these boys are in poor shape. Either they're very young, they have shoes on that aren't suited for the hiking (seriously, I get that not everyone can buy the latest-greatest shoes, but flip flops? Where are the instructions??), or they're overweight . I always smile and try to say something encouraging.....I run the trail a LOT, so I know what's coming up basically at any point along the way. I'll say "Hey, you've got 20 more yards and then just one more climb til you're out" or "You're past halfway!" or something like that. You know, just try to be nice and give them a pat on the head.

Today, there were boys out with a leader on the long trail.....in the weather I described above (again, bless that leader's heart). After I popped out my earbuds (which had been spouting a delightful shuffle of the Beatles, Jack Johnson, Miranda Lambert, Simon and Garfunkel, Dave Matthews Band, Norah Jones, Nickel Creek, Chopin, Lady Antebellum, James Taylor, and Dar Williams -when you run for an hour and a half you have time for great variety) long enough to say "Hey, great day! You guys are doing great" I heard their leader say "See that, guys? She's a GIRL [emphasis his], and she's RUNNING this! You gotta pick it up. Quit whining!"

Several things went through my head.

1) Ha, one of those men to whom every female, regardless of their age, is a perpetual child. Bless his heart.
2) Maybe I should turn around and point out to this idiot that, while he and his boys may be "outdoorsy" and hike once in a while, I run miles upon miles every day, and am therefore in much better shape to be running than those boys - who probably spend more time on the couch than on their feet - are to be even walking.
3) I'm wearing cold gear - Mizuno breath-thermo tights and jacket, polyester under-layer, thick socks, shoes that drain the water out, gloves, headband....and you, bless your heart, have these kids out here in jeans and jackets.
4) I run this trail multiple times a month. It's much easier for me to engage in a healthy push-then-rest pace because I KNOW WHAT I HAVE LEFT. Little boys who have no grasp of just how far 7 miles is, are gonna struggle. Poor kids.

And because I was in a reasonable mood and cruising along much too nicely to be of a mind for an interruption/confrontation, I rambled on, carefully putting my earbuds in (which ironically were playing Dar Williams' "When I Was a Boy" - GREAT song - note that I love Dar for her lyrics...her music's okay, but the LYRICS!) to drown out any further misogynist nonsense.

Note that I'm not concerned about the effect of this man's misogyny on me (I kept right on cruising, and will probably forget about his whole thing in a matter of days), but rather on his boys. They're the ones that, through numerous micro-agressions of this sort, will grow up with the idea that being a girl, or resembling one, is shameful. That if you're a boy who's "girly," then you're "whining." This has put me in mind of a quote my friend Vanessa sent me today - that the worst insults you can throw at a girl are names for girls with some tie to their sexuality (slut, bitch, c*&t, etc), and the worst names you can call a boy have to do with - wait for it - BEING A GIRL!

I hereby resolve today to try harder to create a world with more gender-inclusive feminism. I will, from now on, actively discourage such insults, and teach all children and young people, male and female, that they have valuable traits, regardless of which gender those traits are typically associated with.

Oh wait. I've already been doing that. Guess the run in with the Scout leader (bless his heart) just reinforced my resolve.

Losing faith (some more)

But this time in the public education system.

My 202 students read "La abeja haragana" by Horacio Quiroga today for their literature section. It's a great story, you could do some fun things with it with students who had more language or more literature interest. With mine, all I was going for was the theme of "community helps us all to live a better life." The first thing that I had them do was to get into groups and think of stories with similar themes.

They couldn't come up with any.

Not. One. Single. One.

So I gave them the theme. And mentioned "The Little Red Hen" and "The Ant and the Grasshopper". And asked again.

Still nothing. I thought it was the language barrier. Turns out, of the 56 students, only 5 had heard of either story. (Unless they were just playing stupid, which is entirely possible)

This tells me two things:
1) In the course of a generation, elementary schools have shifted their focus SO MUCH toward proficiency testing that they've failed to give students a basic foundation of literary works to draw from.

2) Students, even when they have a story/theme, struggle with critical thinking-type tasks.

This makes me want to homeschool. Because while there are those who will argue that literature is unimportant or too abstract to merit study, I want my kids to be able to read things and analyze them. Reading a story to find its theme isn't that far from reading a contract to get its "gotcha" clause.

And even if there were no practical application, what's wrong with reading a story that makes you think, "Wow, I'm glad we live in a community. My life is better because I don't have to raise my own sheep to shear their wool, spin and weave it, then sew my clothes, all while raising enough food to subsist on and building a house out of whatever I can find lying around."

Love my J boy

Yesterday when it was time to get J up and ready for the day I went in to his room to get him up. He had stripped down to just a diaper and was snuggled into a blanket nest that he built in the tent under his bed.

He groggily looked up at me, said "Mine wants be naytid boy. Mine wants fweep," and pulled the covers up over his head.

I blame the fact that when he gets out of the bath I usually say "Hey, naked boy, come over here!" and his tendency to stay awake after he's been settled in bed.

Why I shouldn't read so much

I'm thinking about reading biographies of prominent LDS women....sort of like my "summer of medieval queens," but with Mormon pioneer women.

These women were, for lack of a more academic word, COOL. They did activist things, they wrote, they studied at universities in the East, they were midwives, they anointed and blessed other women (before such a practice became blasphemous and confined to the temple...WHY?! did we move away from that). I mean, seriously. They were cool.

I was looking for a good biography of Zina Huntington. (Well, her full name was Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith Young....do those last two names tell you something of how her life ran?) I came across her story when I worked in Special Collections at the BYU library....I organized and indexed her brother Oliver's papers, wherein he continually raved about her exceptional healing abilities and her status as the widow of one prophet and wife of another. Anyway. Joseph Smith asked her to become one of his plural wives. She said no and married Henry Jacobs, who had been courting her. Later, Joseph Smith told her he'd seen a vision of a destroying angel, and that polygamy was a divine principle, etc. She was sealed to him. After he died, she was sealed to Brigham Young (still married to Henry, by the way). Eventually Brigham Young told Henry that he needed to leave Zina alone and go get himself a new wife, that she was sealed to Joseph and, because he's Joseph's proxy, Zina and her children were his (Brigham's...even though they were biologically Henry's). Apparently polyandry didn't fly....just polygyny.

ANYWAY. Was investigating for a biography, stumbled on this quote:

“a successful polygamous wife must regard her husband with indifference, and with no other feeling than that of reverence, for love we regard as a false sentiment; a feeling which should have no existence in polygamy.”

This is coming from a woman who said she had a personal testimony of polygamy as an inspired principle. She actively chose her life. She believed it was right. And for all intents and purposes she seemed to thrive in it - did some really amazingly great leadership things. I guess it worked for her. But how SAD is that quote? It breaks my heart....to some extent for her, but really just for the idea.

This idea is why I'm not okay with polygamy. Is it really not okay to want to love and be loved??

Hills, hills, and some more hills

I ran over to The Hill (tm) today. If I run from my house to the top and back again, it's 3 miles. The hill itself is 1/4 mile of that (well, 1/2 a mile to go down too...anyway, you get the idea, it's a freaking big hill, and steep too).

I started intending to run it 3 times, making an even 4 miles. I ended up running it 7 times.

So I ran 6 miles today in just under an hour. But 3 miles of that was hills.

When I get overwhelmed by various demons that haunt me (usually guilt over the fact that if I'm writing enough I'm not planning/teaching/grading enough, or the other way around, but occasionally just general feelings of depression), the best thing I can possibly do is to run on a hill.

My family (on Dad's side) tends strongly toward bipolar disorder, and there's some history of other mental illness (of course, I blame that on the fact that the woman in question had 5 pregnancies in 6 years, but that's another issue). I've managed to keep my own depression under control with diet and exercise. I'm really grateful that that's been the case.

I can always tell when I'm eating wrong or not running enough, because the demons come back.

For today, they've been banished far, far away.