Buckingham Fountain, Or: Can I Do This In 30 Minutes?

When I arrived home about 90 minutes ago, my internet was down.

Whenever an internate outage happens, I immediately get the prickly heat: Did I not pay my bill? Has the world discovered I am not, in fact, an adult person, able to pay her bills, but a foolish child who cannot handle — and does not deserve — the perks of being an adult? While I could still check on my phone where we are on the whole “imminent threat of nuclear war” thing, I couldn’t post on the ol’ PG, which upset me greatly.

So I restarted my computer and restarted my modem. That’s what internet monkeys have been trained to do, right? Right. But it didn’t work. So I tried it again. And I restarted my computer. And then, thanks be, after some minutes I heard the “ding!” of my email program downloading many, many things that I need to deal with immediately, even though it is nearly midnight. Did I deal with them?

No.

Because first, I must run to you. You, reader. Because I love you. And if I don’t write down my life, if I don’t wave, however digitally, to you, it’s not okay. It just isn’t. You’re stuck with me.

But the delay in connecting to the internet put me behind. Hey, I know my genius, brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning prose seems effortless, the truth is that writing my public journal takes time. Some posts come easy; some come real hard. It’s a mystery, which posts will be which. Some posts might come easy because I had a certain sandwich at lunch; other posts are brutal and take hours (or happen over the course of a couple days) and who knows why — though I do want to point out that if a writer/person takes a real long time to write/say something, it’s because that writer/person is not sure of what he/she wants to write/say. Makes sense, right? It makes sense for me, too.

So here we are, and I have no time. What you’re reading is has been quickly written because I have very little time before the clock strikes midnight. This cannot be polished further if I want to post for September 5, which I do want to do.

What can I tell you in 30 minutes?

I can tell you that very much against my inclination I have gone jogging a few times over the past month. I don’t want to be a jogger. I don’t want to “go jogging”. I don’t want to do 5k runs, or 10k runs, or — ever, ever — a marathon.

But on my birthday, exactly a month ago, I was up at the Island and I just needed to run. I was probably needing to run from something; let’s be honest, people. So I did. I ran three miles. It felt good. I didn’t listen to music. I didn’t go fast. I just did it. What I liked was that there weren’t any screens involved. What I liked is how I remembered “jogging” doesn’t belong to “joggers” and that there is no “right way” to move faster than walking. What I liked is that I forgot that I liked it.

Yesterday, I went jogging. I didn’t go for hours. I went for 30 minutes. It was great. I didn’t do it well. I wasn’t a fitness model in a magazine. I just moved my body through space, outside, with no internet eating at me. I ran through Grant Park and I ran past the great Buckingham Fountain. Had I ever seen it more fully? Had I seen it with more reverence?

I have just enough time to tell you that I had not. I have just enough time to tell you that it was time to make the change.