Friday, August 03, 2012

Get off my back!

Hawthorne had to wait
while I ran 4 hill repeats
in Brookline today

#haiku

Today was 4 hill repeats, a new PR for me.  It didn't feel bad and, to be honest, I probably could have pushed myself to 5 but this damn Hawthorne paper is weighing heavily on me.  If you haven't worked hard for a grade in a class that should be in your wheelhouse but isn't, then it's hard to explain why the last few weeks have been all Hemingway and Hawthorne.    I am a writer, but critical writing feels so forced and tedious.  I just don't understand why it doesn't flow from my finger tips to the keyboard the way a piece of fiction or poetry does.  A 1,000 word column, no sweat.  A 1,000 word critical analysis of the role of gender in Hemingway... not so much.

On Monday, when I press the send button, I will feel free from Blithedale and the Utopian experiments of the mid-late 1800's New England and I have four glorious weeks of my style of writing before I go back to herding small children.

Unfortunately, Nathaniel Hawthorne stands between me and that sense of joy right now.  So up and down the hills, when I wasn't chatting with locals about what we were doing and why, I was trying not to run with dear old Nathaniel.  He was too sad and his whining about people not getting his vision of Utopia only slowed me down as it sat uncomfortably on my shoulders.

Instead I chose to put him down and fall back into Reverend Peyton's "Mama's Fried Potatoes" and Flatfoot 56's "Hoity Toity" to recapture the joy of running.  So back to ride the shores of sanity off the coast of vanity of Utopian societies in New England, grateful for that 50 minute escape I had this morning.

No comments: