I can run a mile faster than you can make pasta

After my half marathon this weekend I was so hungry I ate grapes without removing the grape-branch they came on, I just ate the entire bunch, grape-branch and all.

I'm telling you the end of the story first because I knew at the beginning of the race that I would finish. I sprained my ankle a few weeks and stopped running, and the most I ever ran was 7 miles but that was in May. So I told everyone I would just try it, and stop if it hurt, but I told myself "I will finish, I will die before I stop running and they will bury me at the finish line" and I meant it but I didn't say it out loud because no one likes hearing things like that. 



At every mile on the race there was a station with a team of people throwing us paper cups of the most delicious water on earth. And at every station there was always someone yelling "We've got GU! GU here!" Always answering questions no one was asking like "Do you have GU? Is there GU here?" and never answering the question "What is GU?"

Every mile we would run right past the the them but after 10 miles I started thinking, well maybe. I mean, they have the GU. When am I ever going to see GU again?

I went on their website just now to find out what I ingested. It's some sort of sport gel that tastes like frosting. The recommended usage is 15 minutes before and 45 minutes after exercise and my first thought was "Who would be running for more than 45 minutes?" Me! I would! I ran three times that. I did such a crazy thing.

I have sat through movies that felt years long, and that was the amount of time I was running. I can make pasta 10 times in the amount of time I was running. I can take the bus to work 7 times. I can recite the Brazilian national anthem 64 times and I don't know the Brazilian national anthem or even speak Portuguese. I can do anything now.

I feel like when people look at me, they can immediately tell that I ran 13 miles the other day because I look so incredibly refreshed and powerful and superhuman. But I tell them anyway, just in case.

here comes an airplane

Apartments in Portland don't have screens because supposedly they don't have bugs but they do. I've killed spiders, millipedes, decided to let spiders live so they could kill the millipedes, and found spiders dying slow and painful deaths after millipedes ate their legs off. 

Come visit?

Anyway none of this prepared me for finding a moth the size of a small bird flying around the apartment, blocking all light as it swooped past the ceiling lamp, landing on curtains and almost pulling them off the wall with its weight, humming as loudly as a quiet plane or fighter jet.

I knew I either needed to get brave enough to fight him, get brave enough to co-habitate with him, or get brave enough to change my name, burn everything I owned, and move to another country. I chose co-habitate.

Just a few days later my heart was only skipping about five beats when I saw him in corners, and I was already choosing what actress would play me in the movie about our friendship that overcame all odds. Tina Fey? Zooey Deschanel? Should I just play myself? The mothbird was not faring so well. He stopped flying and started slithering and jerking around the floor, creaking and wrapping his wings around himself like some sort of tiny elderly Dracula looking for tea.

Seeing him in pain should have brought me immense pleasure, and it did, but it's also a new sort of scary. The best news is that now that he's flightless its only a matter of time before the millipedes get to him and this is all just another horrible, horrible memory.

brought to you by 40 apples

The other day at the grocery store someone had abandoned a table with energy cube samples - tiny silver-wrapped squares of pure organic energy and now I have two handfuls of them.

An energy cube tastes like a Starburst if a Starburst tasted like vitamins and sand instead of like sugary imaginary fruit. And if you can bear to swallow them they give you energy the natural way. Quercetin.

What is quercetin? My ten minutes of research was inconclusive. But one energy cube contains as much quercetin as 40 apples! That's right, to quote the company's website "to get the equivalent you'd have to be willing - and able - to eat 40 apples in a sitting."

During a STUDY where quercetin was administered to four college students, one SUBJECT claimed to have a slightly better day. No report on how the students in the CONTROL GROUP compared but unless they ate nine apple pies for breakfast, they probably didn't get enough quercetin. The words in bold indicate that this is SCIENCE.

I have no idea what Vitamin "Sprinkles" are but expect a review of them soon.

A stranger punched me - the way a friend would punch.

I've been writing every day since I was ten and I don't look at the old parts very often. When I do I find things like this:

“Also I am planning on hosting (is that a word?) a circus.”

- age 10 

“A stranger punched me in the hall today, the way a friend would punch! I need to find them.”
- age 13

“Don’t treat me like a child. I am two months away from possibly having a learner’s permit.”
- age 14

“Three wishes: lots of money, be really pretty, don’t really need a third wish.”
- age 15

“I feel so lonely and angry and no one understands me. I also have a pretty solid tan.”
- age 17