I'm not crazy about this picture

But it has Marseille in it. Do you miss Marseille so, so much? I do too. Have you eaten Bouillabaisse? I hope not. It combines every gross food there is.

I do like the next picture, because it is so, so complicated and step 32 looks like an episode of Cooking Dares, a game my siblings and I invented that once resulted in all of us drinking peppermint extract with allspice, beef bouillon cubes, and red pepper flakes mixed in it.

Outer space tights and the not worst idea I've ever had

I signed up for another race a few weeks ago - the cheapest race I could find when I woke up in the middle of the night and started signing up for races and buying space-printed tights online.

I didn't get incredibly excited about the race until yesterday, when I got an email that detailed a ton of important information I skipped over, and a short reminder about weight categories. Weight categories?!

Every weight category is named after a different type of horse (obviously) and while my weight has zero benefits, the class just fifteen pounds above me gets a discounted race fee and a ton of free things. Possibly a free horse. I skipped over most of the email.

Challenge accepted, horse race. The race isn't for another week and fifteen pounds is nothing - that's like an especially large sandwich or two newborn babies.

In high school all my friends started a two-day steak-and-excessive-amounts-of-water diet to meet the minimum weight to participate in the blood drive and everyone swore it had absolutely nothing to do with an attractive and persuasive health teacher who smoked cigarettes through a Kleenex to show us how much tar was in them. This story ends with everyone dropping like thin vomiting pubescent flies in the halls so I'll skip over the middle parts.

The only possible downside is that if I gain fifteen pounds my new space tights might not fit anymore - I knew I should have bought more pairs. They're going to make me so good at jumping.

superpowers and super-diseases I'm interested in.

If I were in charge of designing heaven there would be a station where you could test out how each of these things feels. There would also be an arena where you could watch ancient Greek athletes compete in an arena versus modern Olympic athletes. Who would win? Aren't you curious? Now back to the superpowers and illnesses station:

Supertaster for one meal
The way food tastes to me depends more on my mood than what I'm eating. So I'm very interested in being a supertaster for one meal, and I would like the meal to have hot chocolate in it.

Face blindness for an hour
Are you a hypochondriac? I worry I might be. I also worry I might have face blindness, especially after I meet a dozen blonde girls or five bald middle-aged men with one-syllable names. I don't have face blindness though, and I am curious what it looks like.

Photographic memory for a week
Like Cam Jansen. Camera phones have made photographic memories obsolete and poor Cam Jansen probably owns thirty cats by now but I'm still mildly interested in this.


Mantis shrimp vision for one second
Mantis shrimp vision! What if you could see color through 16 cones instead of 3? What would seeing a thousand times more colors than we see now even look like? I have no idea and I wish I could see this for even just one second. More than a second would probably drive me insane.


Pigeon sense for a day
I wish I could traverse the earth using magnets. The way pigeons do, not the way people who have swallowed magnets do.

Super jumping for a lifetime, if you use it for good not evil
Humans don't ever have this ability, but I wish I could jump over buildings, the way a grasshopper can.  I would like to be able to use this skill forever, so I could perfect it and not smash through skyscraper windows or hit birds. I would jump to work and I would jump over rivers and I would jump in malls instead of using the escalator. Is this bad on your knees? Not in heaven. Not in the heaven I'm designing.

 

especially if the cheetah also had leather pants

What did you do this weekend? I ran a relay. It was 216 miles, plus some decimal.

I am not the best runner but the other people on my team were. One had their pelvis crushed by a truck but it somehow healed and they are still running marathons. The other runners were all equally impressive but did you read that part about the truck?

In a relay you all take turns so when you're not running, you're driving in a van full of runners to the next exchange so you can swap runners. While you're driving you can eat whatever snack foods you want. Here's how it went down:

When it was my turn to run (I was last) I ran six miles. Super fast because I was so excited!

Then, while the other half of our team was running, we drove to a high school gym where hundreds of us were taking 90-minute naps on cots in semi-darkness and I thought "I am in a dark room with hundreds of insane people" over and over and I hardly slept at all. 

Then we got back in the van and I ran another six miles in the dark with a flashlight and the stars were so beautiful there were veins of galaxies swirling around them. 

Then we drove to a campsite and while the other van was running I slept for 90 minutes in the front seat of the van sweating even though I was cold. 

We woke up and it was so beautiful and all of us were vomiting from exhaustion and we got back on the road.

When it was noon I ran another six miles, promising to myself that when this was done I would buy a Rascal and never move again. And then we were done and it was so amazing and I got a ton of free quercetin samples and I wish I could do a relay every weekend.

The roads we ran on were unmarked so there was no way to know if you'd run ten feet or ten miles. It felt like running in the middle of the ocean until you got to the "One Mile Left" sign at the end of every leg, and the "One Mile Left" sign was the Best Sign Ever. 

Because, as people on my team kept saying, "You can do anything for a mile." And that felt pretty true. Even if I were tired or wearing leather pants, I could probably run a mile from a cheetah. I could walk a mile barefoot to a pharmacy to get bandaids if I had cut my hand while slicing an apple again, because I always put my thumb under the apple and hope for the best. I could skateboard a mile, even though skateboarding is something I've never done but always assumed I'm a natural at. You can do anything for a mile.

But then my friends in the van started getting a bit more generous with what "you" can do. When one of us was feeling exhausted but had a 3-mile leg coming up things suddenly escalated to "You can do anything for three miles." And then later, completely unprovoked, I heard a "You can do anything for six miles." Stop right there.

There are only a few things I can do for six miles and running is barely one of them. I can't even look at Instagram on my phone on the bus for six miles. Six miles is a really long distance, and I ran that distance three times in two days on very little sleep. I love sleep. I did a crazy thing this weekend and it was the best weekend ever.

Things I can eat for 216 miles:
trail mix made entirely of seven different kinds of chocolate
chia bars
strange and delicious hummus that made us all sick
two thousand carrots
antioxidants dipped in chocolate
an island's worth of bananas with very fancy peanut butter
Greek yogurt chips
handfuls of turkey slices
more of that hummus