I’m silly (and a child), but I’m back.

04Aug08

I was going to let this die gracefully (and by gracefully I mean stop writing in it and never mention this endeavour again), because it’s been nearly two weeks and I’ve done approximately 938462 things (more on this later: Testosterone Weekend in Delaware, then My Brother and I Hit DC: A Mother’s Wet Dream), but haven’t written about it. I’ve been busy doing my usual: not sleeping, then oversleeping, then spending an inordinate amount of time discussing the sleep I did or did not get, usually on gchat. It’s also really easy to neglect this when I have told a total of 3 people about it, so no one reads it.

But this morning I decided I was going to keep writing because I almost missed my bus. Well, not because I almost missed my bus, but what happened. See, I couldn’t fall asleep last night. I’ve had this problem since I was a kid, elementary-school-aged: I’ll be really tired and still not be able to fall asleep. There have been nights at school where I’d get back from McTrib at 3 a.m. after having slept just four hours the night before, and still it will take me an hour to finally fall asleep. So the end result is today I overslept.

I missed the late-but-still-ok-to-make-my-train orange line train by 30 seconds — it was pulling out of the station as I pounded my SmarTrip card onto the turnstile and dashed to the escalator. Great, the next train wasn’t for 9 minutes. I sat tapping my feet, not unstereotypically, on the train. And when the doors opened at West Falls Church and I could see my 425 bus about to pull from the curb, I did something that made me want to write again: I ran like hell.

I sprinted, arms flailing, heels feverishly click-clack-click-ing, dresh all ablur around my knees and thighs, out the train door, up the escalator, through the turnstile, down the escalator, into the bus loop, across the sidewalk, and right to my bus.

“Wow, way to run,” my mildly sketchy bus driver, who would probably kidnap and have his way with me if given the chance, said.

“Yeah,” I exhaled.

Thing is? I was grinning the entire time. I think that in this 9-5 humdrum work week I’ve become accustomed to, where every morning I need to carefully match my dress to my shoes to my cardigan to my bag… something lost its color. And the truth about some random, over-detailed run I’ve sketched out, is that these things have always made me feel ALIVE. That was the inspiration for my overhyped article, “Why I Chose Northwestern”: the line about running at night to catch shuttles. Unabashed sprinting outside a runner’s circle is a very brief but very total loss of self-consciousness. You don’t care what anyone thinks about you or what you’re wearing or what time it is, you just have to catch that damn bus. Maybe that makes me smile so hard because that’s what I’m always chasing after — not a shuttle, not the 425 Fairfax Connector bus — but the utter joy it was to be 5-years-old and not care if your shirt was tucked in or what strangers thought about you.

Today will be a good day, I’ve decided. It’s Day 4 of breaking my caffeine addiction: this morning, I replaced my cup of coffee, two sugars, two creams, with a chocolate-glazed donut and a carton of skim milk. It feels good to be five.

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Tags: 425, bus, running, writing