now it looks like this: you can swallow or you can spit, you can throw it up or choke on it

I read this trendy I'm-a-working-girl-in-my-20s piece in a funny, popular blog (see: opposite of this blog) about crying while exercising. That sounds weird, but the writer's position was like, sometimes it's just a bad day and because you're in your 20s and still basically an adultchild, you want to burst into unmanly tears, but there's not really a great time with work and corporate important job and you can feel it all welling up. But she said it's great because nobody can tell you're crying at the gym, maybe you're just really into the workout and sweating in a weird eye-face way. (I don't get funny working girl trend pieces.) 

 I did actually get to try this technique out this evening, though, during a particularly vulnerable-mooded run in the usually-deserted graveyard. I always run alone, so I mostly don't really think about how I look to other people. Tina Fey has this great quote in her career advice book. She says, "Some people say, “Never let them see you cry.” I say, if you’re so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone." But... it turns out it's really hard to cry and also breathe when you're running. I thought I was gonna die, and when I stopped to choke on the air not going through my paralyzed lungs, my elderly hermit neighbor appeared out of nowhere to walk calmly past me as I gasped and hyperventilated and audibly sobbed. It was not my greatest moment. I want to write a trendy I'm-a-working-girl-in-my-20s funny piece about that.

Today was stupid enough to listen to the Goo Goo Dolls un-ironically and then later (now) believe that all of U2's album Achtung Baby accurately represents all my jammy, earnest feelings. (Stickwytch says, Back in highschool? Signs point to yes. Except now I get all the oral sex references in said album.) But really fucking stupid. I always write in this blog when I'm in a bad mood.

I think it's going to rain tomorrow. It felt like rain. I had a weird conversation recently with somebody who doesn't know me very well and I was thinking about that when I was cry-running. I've been told before that I'm a hard person to get to know, which seems like a little bullshit. (For instance, I just wrote about how I cried today for no reason except feeling helpless, inept, and confused.) But anyway, so I was being polite to someone I knew vaguely who complained of me being a hard person to make plans with or get to know in any genuine capacity. "You're such a diplomat!" I wanted to say, no, idiot, I'm an explorer. And as my boy Charles Wright says, All explorers must die of heartbreak. Middle-aged poets too. 

This post has so many quotes in it so far--you'd think I was getting senior symposium credit for it. I don't care if I seem dramatic and overwrought. I am dramatic and overwrought. Did you know the poet whose bit I posted yesterday, she was a PhD student of Charles Wright at UVA. I know her work because she was friends with a teacher of mine who lived in C-ville concurrently. If I'm an explorer, though, I'm chewing over the same piece of ground obsessively and never making any progress, tonight and always. Back in high school, right? 

When I was running I noticed the dogwoods were starting to change their colors. The way the leaves folded unevenly up made them look like they were covered in stained, cracked leather. I had the thought that the dogwood will probably be extinct before the end of my lifetime, with the blight and all. And then I thought about what an arrogant, ignorant thought that was. I could die tomorrow, and the dogwoods don't need the likes of me to feel sorry for them. I should go re-read the Jedi Apprentice intermediate book series until I throw up of being too overwrought.