Skip to main content

Tribute to epiphanies

Things that made me happy today:

  1. Nice day out in town with my friend
  2. Didn't have any arguments with said friend even though we discussed several controversial topics (good, considering we argue about the smallest things)
  3. Bought a lovely bag formyself - which was on sale!
  4. Ran 1km non-stop. Then ran another 1km non-stop.

A kilometre probably isn't much for a lot of people but it is for me, the person that struggled to finish the 1500m in school. I'm hardly the adrenaline junkie, but all this recent exercise is my renewed bid to lose weight, get fit and to keep myself occupied while unemployed. It's not the easiest thing to keep some sort of structure to your day when every time you open your eyes in the morning you know you can roll over and go back to sleep becuase you don't have to go to work. You can stay in your jammies and watch re-runs of Scrubs and 8 Simple Rules all day. There is no reason to shower and to comb your hair.

For the past two days I felt like I was coming down with respiratory infection. My throat was sore, I could not stop coughing and I was sleeping long hours. Also, for the past week my eczema had flared up, making me dig all of my fingernails into my face resulting in my skin to weep and cake over. My new nickname was 'Crusty'. This afternoon, I had heartburn because I missed lunch. To top it all off, all that emollient I had slathered on my face had caused a breakout of massive volcano-like pimples across my forehead and chin. I could not have felt more hideous.

Still I had mustered a day out in town. No cries of, "Oh my GOD! What is that?!"

I could feel (or imagined) the weight piling on due to my inactive life. Which is why, despite feeling unwell and like a lard-arse, I put my running shoes on and thought, right, today you shall run further than you have in the past 2 weeks. You shall push yourself.

Today was a perfect day for a run. The sun was out. Winds strong enough to form waves on the river. The faint smell of the sea on the air. There wasn't a human being in sight but I hardly felt alone. How could I on a day like this when you've got life all around you? Here was no place to feel morose or be self-pitying.

As I was pounding the pavement, gasping for air yet feeling that I could still push it to the next marker, then the next and the next, I thought to myself - I'm not sick. Not in the way I think I am, anyway. I'm not a mushy bag of flesh that needs to go around in two potato sacks. I'm not a useless, unemployed bum. I'm not dying of a sore throat. The heartburn is simple reflux. I am not only a pair of ovaries and a uterus whose biological clock is running out. My 'shelf-life' isn't expiring. I am still young with a healthy body and a healthy (okay, maybe a little dirty) mind. I am not degenerating, only mending. All hurts can be mended.

I stopped running and sat down on the stone steps of the esplanade. My face was turned to the sun and the wind. A kid was throwing pebbles from the road above. A rusty supermarket rolley sat overturned on the river bank. Suddenly I laughed. What strange epiphanies one has while running. I had more while I was sitting there by the river. But like Tenacious D's Tribute to the greatest song in the world, I couldn't remember all of it now that I'm sitting in my flat all freshly showered and moisturised.

This is just a tribute.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

You gotta stay sharp

This week I celebrated my 28th birthday. This week I was accidentally stabbed with a needle contaminated with the blood of a patient with Hepatitis B. It was all going so well, I thought. The patient had already been screened for HIV and venereal disease and she was in the clear. What are the chances that she would be positive for Hepatitis B? Well, 100% as it turned out. I wasn't terribly upset at first. It was a small nick that didn't bleed much, though it surprised me enough that I yelled in the operating theatre. Everybody froze when they realised what had happened. My colleague felt bad for accidentally stabbing me with the suture needle. As I pointed out, it was an accident. I was double-gloved and we were all following the correct procedures, so it was unfortunate that I got a needlestick injury. What pissed me off was the attitude of the staff when I was trying to get all the various forms filled out and sent off to the correct persons. Their primary concern seemed to b...

The goat

So, there we were - three women in their late twenties, lounging on a faux-leather sofa having a nice post-prandial banter with a bunch of friends. Usually it would be just the three of us - me, Si and Em - talking about life, work and relationships - having that Bridget Jones moment which we thought would never come to us, because 'oh no, we're so above that!' But tonight was a farewell party for a friend who was off to Australia for a newer, better job in a newer, better place than sorry-ass England, and the talk frequently turned to career paths, professional exams, work-life balance etc. Cat was talking about a friend who works in computers who did not go to university because she thought it was a waste of time. Instead she plunged straight into work and gained experience and skills on the job. She is only a year older than me but she has been so successful that she has two homes in London and one in San Francisco where she now works from home and makes shedloads of mon...

January's list

Music I have been listening to a lot of Pentatonix lately. I stumbled upon them on You Tube (where else?) a couple of years ago when their Evolution of Music video was making the rounds. I enjoyed it, thought they were pretty talented and that was the end of it. They popped up on my recommended list a few months ago, along with their performances when they were on The Sing Off...and I've been hooked. My playlist has been mainly Pentatonix for the past 3 months or so. Some of their songs are a miss for me, but overall they are a really talented, unique bunch, and there is no doubt that they will go far. Because of a Pentatonix cover of a song by Belgian artist Stromae, I've discovered other artists and music that have been a regular on my playlist. 1) La La Latch (Sam Smith/Disclosure/Naughty Boy mashup) - Pentatonix https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsVeQnBmp70 2) Black Is The Colour of My True Love's Hair - Peter Hollens & Avi Kaplan https://www.youtube.com/wa...