Drum majors rule!

One rainy evening about this time last year, I enjoyed an adrenaline rush on the Boston Common, walking home from a movie ......

.... when I was priveleged to beat off a potential mugger with my duck umbrella.

Here is the West Coast version of the same incident ...... except that she instead used her marching band baton.

I am proud to welcome her into the sorority of ballsy female walkers with blunt instruments!

Memo: FWABs, clone thyselves

Last night, rather last-minute, I helped my friend B pack up his studio apartment.

He was only moving across town, so no hard-core boxing or carrying sofas, just throwing stuff into garbage bags. Two closets of clothes and 18 dresser drawers of socks, t-shirts, clarinet reeds and unpaid bills.

This was beneficial for him -- he needed the extra hands. This was more than beneficial for me; after a cranky day at the office I needed an outlet that involved throwing stuff.

More than anything, it was cathartic for 2 busy friends who don't hang out enough. We were overdue to dissect our loves and loves lost. I talked about my weekend dates. He talked about his girlfriend.

(I still contend that talking about one's romances with the opposite sex gets the angst out better than any other therapy session. I think B finds similarly, since this is our most frequent conversation when together.)

While wrapping things up, one of B's musical acquaintances came by. I knew who he was, but we'd never before met, so we made introductions and he and B started talking. Then the acquaintance turned to me:

"So B has told me you're a musician...."

Before I could explain any part of my pianistic talents, B interrupted:

"No, no! This isn't V...."

Of course. The acquaintance had thought I was B's girlfriend V -- a professional musician not there because she was playing a concert. Was it because I was simply there and a woman? Or do B and I, who on occasion exude old-married-couple banter, give the vibe of being together?

We all chuckled about it, I explained myself, and the conversation moved on. But it reminded me of a walk I took last Friday with my friend, A , a happily married woman who (along with husband C) regularly subjects herself to my woes.

On this Friday, A listened to an exhausted, overscheduled unmarried woman who was frustrated with everything about being an exhausted, overscheduled unmarried woman trying to date exhausted, overscheduled unmarried men. After some 30 minutes of my monologue, she stepped back:

A: "So I have a question. It seems like these guys you've been dating are nothing like your guy friends. C and I both wonder that."

Cynical and in no mood to be trifled with, I replied:

K: "A, believe me. If my guy friends or guys like them actually wanted to date me, I certainly would be dating them."

But of course. A, as always, has a point.

Nonetheless, I don't have any current FWABs who I could date anytime soon.

Where are their doubles? Stat?

Flashback (a.k.a.....sigh)

Last night was my first weeknight free in what felt like a long time.

I used it to visit the gym for my first ab exercises in 3 weeks, scope for and book airplane travel to Minnesota, answer a slab of back-logged e-mails, update the long-neglected match.com profile.

(I am paying for it, after all.)

Updating the online-dating profile always results in an avalanche of viewing activity ... and adding a new photo shoves you to the top of some queue. Sure enough, this morning, I've nearly 50 hits since 7 p.m. yesterday. An e-mail. A couple of (my favorite) winks.

In my history of online dating, I make it a habit not to go back to a person who a) did not respond to a previous inquiry I made; or b) responded with a "no thank you."

Yet one of last night's winks came from a gentleman already familiar to these parts from last summer: a man with an abiding interest in feet. As you will read, I found his inquiry not quite to my taste. You will also read that 6 weeks later he found this blog (most likely because I printed his match.com handle ... it was my early days of blogging and I now avoid doing this) and went on a relative tear in the comment section.

Curious. I did not express interest in him the first time he wrote and publicly said so. He was not pleased that I highlighted him in this space and publicly said so.

It is certainly his prerogative to write to whomever he finds interesting and he certainly doesn't seem like an uninteresting guy, himself.

But we have already walked this road together, not successfully. Why does he take up his time, and mine?

(Oy. Starting to get cynical again. Grrr.....)

T-plus 6: The Recap

Last Monday I promised you some post-Marathon "stories to follow".

With the busy week it did take me more time than I anticipated to coalesce my thoughts on this year's running. Yesterday afternoon -- following a bonafide 12-hours of sleep -- my writing chops finally returned, so I put together the following missive to send to the folks who financially supported me.

If you're reading this blog, you also supported me. So with slight modifications, I'll share with you as well.

Cheers --

-------------------------------------
Greetings, friends:

First things first-- I'm still here!

A week of crazy workdays followed by four-hour musical rehearsals every night left little time to contemplate the completion of this week's early focus.....Monday's Boston Marathon in 4 hours 13 minutes 48 seconds.

Here are some more fabulous numbers for y'all to contemplate:

- 9:41 minutes-per-mile. While this was slightly less than my original 9:30 goal, I was very happy to run the entire race at a consistent 9:30-10-minute pace. Even greater.....my first 5 kilometers was 30:41 minutes while the final timed 5K was under 29:44.

In running parlance this is called a reverse split -- running the end of the race faster than the beginning. That means that after 23 miles of hill running I was still running my pace. And this is what a runnerdesires.

- 84 individual donations were made to fundraising efforts for Children's Hospital Boston.

Donors were family, friends of my family, friends from church, friends from the theater, friends from work, friends from piano gigs, friends I used to sing with, friends of friends whom I've never met, parents of friends, friends I met campaigning for Obama this fall, friends from my hometown who I haven't seen in more than a decade, and friends I used to date.

I've gotten many comments this week of folks being proud of me. Sheesh. I'm proud of you.

- (Incidentally, the temperature today is 84 degrees with a beating-down sun. Conditions on race day were in the low 40s with a breeze, 20-mph wind gusts and overcast skies. Which for a 10-minute miler like myself, could not have been more perfect.)

- $5,335.18 raised through these donations.

My 200-plus CHB teammates and I have together raised over $1.2 million dollars through this year's race.

- 352 (approx.) times I thought of my CHB patient partner Jayla during Monday's run.

Y'all heard from me last Saturday when I was sick with a chest cold, sore from shoulder to hip to foot, and very, very tired. I knew that going into Monday morning's race without a focussed mindset would be dangerous.

So I determined that whenever I'd feel sore or tired and not wanting to keep going -- I would think of Jayla and her parents, who face so many more challenges in her life than I will ever need to. Secondarily, I would think of my friends and family, emphasizing one person or group for each mile. I wrote all these folks' names on my forearms for easy reference and can't tell you the number of times I looked down to remind myself. (See photo "tattoos".)

These 2 foci proved to be the key to starting and finishing the race with a smile.

Monday's race was, for me, a mental victory over physical limitations. My legs were trained but not happy. My chest was full of phlegm. My mind was distracted with work, musicals, love life. Up until that morning my head had not thought about how I was going to make those 26.2 miles happen.

And I'm convinced that because every 5 minutes I told myself "If Jayla has to spend her childhood not walking, I can certainly spend the next X minutes in discomfort running", because I saw friends at miles 13, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24 and 26 and even got a kiss from one, because at mile 19.5 of Heartbreak Hill I said to myself "Smile, damn you, smile! Think about the awesomeness of this event and be grateful you are in it!" and then I did smile all the way up said damn hill, because Kenmore Square was a screaming rock-star stadium of Red Sox fans screaming for ME....the day was what it was.

Which was well worth it.

Dateline: Southie 4/25/09

Dorchester Heights Monument. 

1:42 p.m.  

84 degrees Farenheit.

Because who wants to be blogging on a day like this, anyway.

End o' the week. That's all.

Yes, I'm at work. Yes, I have more work to do than I can possibly finish today, even if I were working every minute. Yet I would like to check in here, so I have given myself 5 minutes to put together an update.

What's going on?

Head cold still hanging out in my chest. Coughing subsiding. Alas, the show I've been practicing for goes up tonight.....and last night's dress rehearsal featured me hacking phlegm through the first 100 measures of the overture. Anyone want to wish me to "break a lung"?

E-mailing off and on with a very busy Audacious Man this week. We had Date #3 Sunday evening when he took me out for Thai for my pre-marathon feast. Alas, this is the word from him yesterday:

"I'm ssssssssssick. :-)"

Oy. Probably my bad. Probably moves a probable Date #4 into next week. I'll ask him

Chatting, still, too, with the Young Scientist, about this and that. We have good chats. We also had to do a marathon follow-up....the route runs past his place and while I did keep an eye out for him, the wall-o-drunks whooping the entire length of Beacon Street obscured any possible sighting. We still might go for a run and post-run dinner once I recover my legs.

Which, by the way, are mostly recovered. And I've been watching the thermometer this morning as it inches up into the 70s; the sky remains cloudless. Maybe I'll put on the sunglasses and walk the 2.65 miles up to Cambridge for the show tonight.

Finally, Happy Late Earth Day.

We stay up very very late

Getting through this workplace morning thanks to my second-favorite college CD.

(Ah....Counting Crows before the Shrek 2 theme song ...)

It is homestretch week round here.

The marathon is over, yes, and the legs are resting and healing.

(Walked down my 2 front steps this morning in less than 30 seconds! Hooray!)

Hands are busy, however. The marathon tech-week schedule of the musical Nine (opening Friday night at the Cambridge YMCA, y'all!) is only halfway finished. Which means that each night this week, after leaving a desk still piled with unfinished work from last week (and piling higher as I stop working to write this), it is off to Central Square for 3 hours of piano playing.

I'm not trying to have a pity party, but there is no room to sleep nor relax round here.

Last night I tried.

Escaped rehearsal at 10:55, bolting 2 blocks to the liquor store for a 6-pack of Sam in the 1 minute before the doors locked. Carried it back to Southie first on the train and then the 15-minute walk home. Opened the first bottle .... then got caught up eating cereal because I was so blasted hungry, then became enmeshed in the dance of sliding my laptop to all corners of the kitchen table to find the one spot where the wireless connection would NOT keep bugging out so I could finish downloading photos to attach to an e-mail I had meant to send to all my marathon supporters telling them about the race and thanking them .... and after 2 hours of this dance I had neither drank the beer nor written the marathon e-mail and had finished off the box of cereal and my eyeballs were so dry they stuck to my eyelids and when at 2:05 a.m. I lay under the covers they would not close and my heartbeat would not neutralize despite ujjayi breathing and the drone of the BBC World News anchor because, I gather, I could only think of how tired I was and how I would have to get up in 5 hours and start another day that looked exactly the same as the one I just unsuccessfully finished.

Oh, thank God this is the homestretch.

And thank God for Dunkin' Donuts Turbo Ice.

And, for "August and Everything After."

(Everything hopefully including unfettered, unaching, unstressed sleep.....)

Small, small Beantown

Marathon reflections are going to have to wait for Wednesday.

This is almost a better story.

Earlier this month, you might remember, I unwittingly set up an ex-date on another date, via the combination of my blog and OKC. When the Artist from the Western Suburbs e-mailed with the tale, I was, as I told him, stunned like I rarely get stunned.

Today I was amused to find the following Facebook message from "Random Blog Reader":

RBR: Are you the Karin of the Single in the City blog? I've enjoyed reading it and seeing some of the same guys I've at least received messages from (like the 22 year old Aussie). And I laughed when I read about Hallelujah Man, because I went out with him once. The date went well until I mentioned a mutual acquaintance of ours, who had briefly dated him. Then the date ended shortly after that ...... Best,

I wasn't quite stunned. Although had forgotten about Hallelujah Man. (Probably because he never responded to my witty love note, the fine fellow. Here's the reference.) RBR also went on to reference his interest in women's sweaters (which I also didn't remember having been a part of his Match.com profile).

Me back:

Karin: Match is a hoot, to be sure. My new theory is the more interesting their profile, the stranger they are in person....!

Yup, that's me and that's fun to hear from you. You are now the second person who has identified match/ok cupid men they know on the blog, which makes me believe is it a SMALL online dating pool in Boston.

Then her:

RBR: Oh, and I went out with MRothko, too, who was slightly annoyed that I insisted on Gmail's IM feature instead of Yahoo, but the first IM chat was highly amusing, so I agreed to meet up with him.

The thing is that the more interesting profiles make me more likely to contact them. Sigh.

It is indeed a small dating pool in Boston. I was telling one of my female friends about the dating parallels I've had with your own travails, and she thinks I might be your double.....

Maybe I should start a support group for 30-something female online daters contacted by idiosyncratic Bostonians with hankerings for (respectively) older ladies, certain types of their clothing, and certain varieties of chat function.

Although perhaps this blog is already taking on that task....?

Dateline: Hopkinton-to-Boston 4/20/09

Pre-race, 8:17 a.m.

Inspiration in permanent marker.

Mile sub-0, 10:25 a.m.

(Should I mention--or will you gather--that 95% of the fans on the course called out "Go Arin!" at my approach?)

Mile 26.1, 2:48 p.m.

The raucous energy of A,B,C,B,E and L 500 yards from the finish (and to be fair, from hundreds of thousands of others) helped provoke a running 4:13.48 finish.

Stories to follow.

.................Countdown: T-minus 39 hours...............

My lungs are still full of mucus.

My energy level is middling.
(The main reasons I took Thursday and Friday off from

updating you here.)

But I slept for 10 hours last night.

And it's marathon weekend in Boston.

The city is full of nervous energy.

Boylston Street is shoulder-to-shoulder

with runners and their families

coming from the expo back near Hereford Street

to fill the restaurants and coffee shops

and CVS stores

(for painkillers and Gatorade

and commemorative copies of the Globe),

all unabashed in wearing their race shoes

and carrying the neon yellow plastic bags

runners receive

after picking up their race numbers.

I just did the same.

In doing so I came just short of Dartmouth Street

and stepped on a freshly-painted finish line

that was not there yesterday.

I also spent an hour at a reception put on by

Childrens Hospital Boston

with my Miles for Miracles teammates

and my patient partner

Jayla (3)

(and her parents, too)

and cried a little bit,

because

that's just what these kinds of events make you do.

Very shortly thereafter I checked my e-mail

and found that my

"biggest fan"

had also sent greetings.

So life is indeed good.

I'm now going home to sleep some more.

Blogger's Bible: When in Doubt, Sleep

Tonight was a night off from running, from rehearsing, from working... although it, truly, didn't feel like a night off.

Tax returns e-filed at 9:03 p.m. Giving the IRS access to my checking account so they can extract 100s of dollars is mentally fatiguing.

Brief chat with Audacious Man, heading out of town for several days. Longer chat with Young Scientist about running, past lovers, if we will ever become lovers , etc. Both situations are trending positive....although the future potential with either man is murky for the moment. Sigh.

To Shaw's Market at 10:30 for peppers and onions and organic green leaf lettuce and chicken tenderloins to take home and cook to, perhaps, reverse the effects of eating all 24 cookies from a package of Thin Mints after rehearsal last night. Word of advice to those who might try to emulate this feat: sugar shock will stay in your system for more than 24 hours. I promise.

And have I mentioned my nose? Or my head? Or my throat, or any other bodily place that secretes ridiculous, endless quantities of gunk that simultaneously block blood flow to the head, sound to the ears and air flow, period? Breathing should not be this difficult.

Have I earned the right to blog no further and to sleep.....such sweet sleep?

Damn straight.

(If and when the Tylenol Cold Medicine does its job, that is....)

Because dating single men isn't complicated enough

Passive pick-up lines on OKC are rarely my favorites.

Then, of course, add another layer of meaning, as evidenced by a message in my inbox from a 50-something suburbanite earlier today:

"I was just puzzling....as to whether you would be interested in spending some time with a married man or not.....but i guess it never hurts to ask."

Don't know about you, but that offer makes me want to jump right into some beige-hot adultery.

Lovely.

Your standard Monday

Tell me if I'm right, that...

....Monday will always be the day I start to sneeze from allergies or a cold or a hangover or something that, whatever it is, fills my head with mucous which, I'd swear, in addition, seeps in to clog brain passages.

....Monday at the job will always include at least 3 projects that go askew and, when finished askewing, will cause a (perhaps more well-rested?) passing colleague to stop and listen to my angry typing before suggesting I "look stressed out." To which I will reply by glaring at him over the top of my glasses.

....Monday means a slow 3-mile jog after work that will result in residual shin and knee and thigh and ankle soreness akin to a body that just ran a couple back-to-back laps to New York City. Folks, I am not old enough to have a body that feels this old after such a brief spell of exercise. I am stymied that the aches persist even during my training taper. Oy.

....Monday means at 11:28 p.m. I'm going to ride the Red Line home after 4 hours of playing piano at a rehearsal and wish that when I arrived home a strong pair of hands---perhaps attached to the arms of someone I enjoyed spending time with and was physically attracted to---would be waiting to attack the knots in my lower back and forearms and then tell me to put my feet in his lap for a rubdown and then, perhaps, put an arm over my shoulder and invite me to lean on the side of his chest and close my eyes and just listen to a relaxed heartbeat and, perhaps, relax myself, an iota or 2.

....Monday is always a day that, when it's tough, I'm not exactly sad to go through it alone, but wouldn't exactly mind having someone meet me at the end of it and tell me that Tuesday won't be exactly the same.

**thanks again to boston.com for the shout-out.

Grateful, today....

...for Easter....

....for Lutheran hymns...

...for the God who taught J.S. Bach how to write cantata 66....

...for baroque violins, oboes and trumpets and a judiciously applied cimbelstern...

...for 12 varieties of egg bake and 100-cup coffee urns....

...for the availability of Asics 2140s after 6 hours of strappy heels...

...for the afternoon warm after a frigid morning....

...for Vinho Verde straight from the freezer...

...for toddlers who run pell-mell in party crowds without tripping and babies with rosy cheeks....

...for a 28-course Portuguese meal and the minds and hands and 2 weeks that created it...

...for the same party hosts....who served an entire pork roast after the pineapple sorbet and flan had been served and found the port glasses just in time....

....for, wow, so many stellar friends....my Boston "family"....that I didn't stop having something to eat or sing about or talk about or celebrate from 7:10 a.m. to 10:04 p.m. and will now fall to bed exhausted and sated....

...and grateful.

Late date (with legs)

It's late on Friday night and I'm still weary from Thursday night.

Going out with Audacious Man already requires great conversational energy.  Adding a walk from Mass Ave near M.I.T. to Lechmere after last call at The Asgard and then staying up with him for several more hours requires stamina.

Audacious Man is still a smart-ass with dark-rimmed glasses and a leather coat who asks probing questions without guile.  But he also displays gentleman qualities:  generous with compliments about my shoes and legs and the way my cowlick falls onto forehead.  Carried my backpack on the hike across East Cambridge.  Insistent to obsession about walking on the outside of the curb when we walked abreast.

For my part....unlike our first date, I decided not to talk about any other recent dates I've been on.  Or at least I decided to try not to.

Audacious Man also turned out to be a height to comfortably kiss without any neck wrenching.

So I give our evening a thumb and a half up....with the remaining half-thumb in neutral because fatigue won't let me lift it higher.  Four a.m. is later than I remember it being 10 years ago...

Date 3 is ostensibly on the horizon. Perhaps.  This is decent news.

Oh....and so I haven't yet told you about how the date began....at rehearsal for the upcoming musical I'm accompanying....with me accidentally trapped in the cage-like vestibule of the Green Street Studios after the cast and crew left and locked the gate post-rehearsal while I was still in the bathroom, how Audacious Man came over from the bar where we were to meet and chatted me up through the bars rather like a jailbird and lover, how the police were called because the studio owner could not be reached in a timely manner, after which a red ladder truck with sirens and lights pulled up and several brawny Cambridge firefighters rescued me by brandishing a crowbar to pry open the lock.

A longer story for later.

Things I just feel like saying...

My brain is on an ADHD kick this morning.

I keep thinking that 1 coherent thought will pop out and assert itself as the topic sentence for a blog entry. But the work day ticks by (we're almost done with the morning!) and small distracting items pile up without resolution. The blog topic is one of them.

Therefore: some things to get off my mind and onto this page:

1) The car's muffler pipe rusted off this weekend. The mechanic already estimated a cost of $575 to fix that and some other rusty stuff down there almost about to fall off, too. Yesterday I had decided to skip the repairs, junk this particular auto, and see if I get enough tax refund to fund a new purchase.

But then I talked to Dad last night. He said:

"Do it. Would you rather have monthly car payments?"

So I'll probably do it.

2) As of this morning, I have misplaced my stack of W-2s. With my tax return only half done. This presents a challenge I haven't quite yet decided how to navigate.

3) I'm not at all upset that Single in the City assisted an ex-date in getting another date. I'm all about everybody being happy. In fact, The Artist sent me a text message yesterday thanking me for making him look good. That's cool.

3a) The Egoist is sustaining an e-mail conversation with me, regarding an assertion he made, the day after our Saturday date:

TE: "I make an effort to keep expectations low so I was expecting to have a miserable time with you and was pleasantly surprised."

Here is the essence of the back and forth, still in progress:

K: "I hope that in future outings you don't feel the need always to keep expectations low. Sometimes it's fun to come in on the high end."

TE: "If they are low you are more likely to be happy when good things happen. If you are expecting amazing things to happen, a moderately good occurance may end up being a disappointment."

K: "I have a fundamental issue with an outlook where one does not expect positive things to happen. It's not so much that one might be setting oneself up for disappointment. It just strikes me, on a level, as sad."

TE: "I am probably guilty of overanalyzation of my philosophy for the sake of discussion, but at least my motives are pure. When I put it as I did, I could easily fall victim to self-fulfilling prophecy when expecting things to turn out poorly. I am an optimist who enjoys the hell out of life, finds solutions to bad things etc. I guess I was trying to say to stay on an even keel and not to get too up or down. More than likely, I have no idea what I'm trying to say. Anyway, if one is truly using their mind to an optimum capacity expectations shouldn't even come into play. They are so focused and enraptured in every moment that thoughts of the past and future are non-existent."

K: "That seems more like the right idea. I'd run with it."

3b) Speaking of dating, Young Scientist popped out of the woodwork on Tuesday night as I browsed on OKC. Said hi. Wanted to talk about running and about who I'm dating.

Said he's single again.

3c) Speaking of even more dating, the 22-y-o "Cuddler" just now sent me a text message.

WTF?

3d) Speaking of, finally, the last bit of dating -- the only current non-virtual variety-- tonight I hope to meet Audacious Man for a beer in Central Square Cambridge after rehearsal.

We'll see how it goes when the hour is late and no peanut-butter burgers are involved.

4) Massage. Last night I had my first full-body version. Every muscle down to my pinky toe got a rubdown. I can't tell you how much better my legs feel, my feet feel, and how I feel.

5) Work is being crazy today. Market is up. It's tax time. Which is time to focus, eh?

Discussion on what it feels like to have so much man action and self-indulgent behavior during Holy Week.....to follow at later juncture.

From the Dept. of You Can't Make This Up...

So you recall a few nights ago I had a benign outing with The Artist from the Western Suburbs.

Him: Tall, broad-shouldered, leather coat and scally cap, drives a lime green VW Beetle. Can talk at length about Belgian ales and running and forges steel sheets into quirky household products in his spare time. Has had enough romantic relationships of varying sorts to have some wisdom, but not drone on. After our drink at a pub on Waltham's main drag, we browsed through a bookstore and he confessed to not being as in love with Harry Potter books as perhaps is the fashion.

This was all well and good. Except that The Artist and I had no spark. Borderline flat-lining. As I already mentioned, I was certain he felt the same level of zero. Because when he dropped me at the train I gave him a smile and a wave and stepped out of his car, and he just smiled back. There were no promises of a future meeting.

I did, however, follow up Monday night with an e-mail:

K: I apologize for not dropping you a note sooner, as I meant to, to thank you for showing me a bit of downtown Waltham on Sunday night. I know that I was a less than ideal conversationalist. Part of that was surely that I was tired (as I said, probably too often). I also didn't quite sense that we had a natural chemistry to take to the bank, and felt thusly quiet.

Nonetheless.....I wish you all the best -- not only in your art projects but the marathon, of course, and just generally.

The Artist had always been a gentleman. So I expected he might acknowledge my note in some way.

What I didn't expect was this response (used with permission of the author):

A: This Artist from the Western Suburbs knew that already, but thank you for the note.

The "casual hand on thigh" was a simple test to see where I was at, when you needed to "stretch" I got the hint. I love subtle communication! Glad to hear it was loud and clear on both sides! Most women are terrible about giving closure, so thank you.

I was actually going to write you Thursday night to do the same. Why Thursday night? Well, later that night on OKC, I was chatting some girl and we got talking about "no chemistry" dates. I said I just got back from one with a marathoner. The girl said "Does she write a blog?" "Yes". She asked what your name was, I replied and she squeals out: "OMG, I have been reading about you!"

After some convincing she points me to the blog, and now she wants to meet the "Artist" on Thursday. I was holding off writing because I know anything I say can be used against me in the court of blog....

By the way, I am thrilled with the moniker! I am glad to see my personal identity is what I want it to be!

So, in a strange way, you are helping me get a lady. I think you should make this into a formal recycling program. You have lots of ladies out there that are reading. Why not offer up some of us to the fans? Make an event of it: You can host the party here. Every girl must bring a single guy that they did not click with, and it will be a swap meet!

Good luck out there and I will keep you updated on how things go....

Countdown: T-minus 13

Y'all remember I'm running the Boston Marathon in 13 days.

(No way to miss it, I know. But this tale needs a lead-in.)

My legs have been hurting now for a number of weeks. Fairly chronically. In fact, so much so, that I've set the chat status on my G-mail account to permanently read "aching and paining." I was chatting there with an OKC friend this morning who led off by asking, "so are you still aching and paining? Really?"

Yes.

Sometimes it is the side of my right knee. Sometimes the outside of my left ankle. Sometimes both ankles. When I cross my knees while seated I feel it in my quads. This morning as I was standing -- yes, standing -- in my flat-foot orthotic mary janes waiting for the bus, a muscle halfway up my right thigh began throbbing in protest because evidently I was leaning too hard on it.

Oy. Thank heaven you can't get addicted to Advil.

This is my sixth marathon and I don't remember these aches and pains in the past, even after the hardest weeks of training. (Which, admittedly, we did just come through in mid-March.) Who knows. I refuse to play the age card here, but do contend that the minute after turning 35 my joint resiliance went downhill faster than Alberto Tomba.

Nonetheless, I am fully trained and ready to get on it April 20. Near to 65 friends have donated $4500 to benefit Children's Hospital Boston and, more directly, a patient there, a girl named Jayla from Rhode Island who has Cockayne's Syndrome, in whose name I am running this year. Many of them will be out on the course to cheer me.

But my mind is not yet up to the task. I'm distracted by the crappy stock market and my car's dangling muffler pipe and by dating being so damned crazy and by insomnia and by my incomplete tax return and by the accompaniment for the musical that opens in 3 weeks that I haven't yet learned and by my cluttered apartment with cereal crumbs on a floor that hasn't been swept in 6 weeks. My mind is going to have to get focussed on those 26.2 miles, somehow, because otherwise the aching and paining is going to insist I stop before I finish.

Enter Mike Huckabee: former governor of Arkansas, Republican presidential candidate. One of both my favorite and least favorite people. Former very overweight gentleman-turned-weight loss advocate. Profiled by A.J. Jacobs in a recent edition of Esquire magazine, which I read while coming home on the train last night. To wit:

"Huckabee has run four marathons. How'd he do it?

'I made a list of twenty-six people who had made a special difference in my life in some way,' Huckabee says. 'I dedicated a mile to each one and I told them in advance — mile thirteen is yours, mile twenty-one, and so on.

'Then I put their names on a little card, and I laminated it so it wouldn't get destroyed in the sweat. You just can't quit, 'cause you would be choking on somebody's mile and you'd have to go back and tell them.'

Today Mike Huckabee is my favorite person. Because I am totally going to plagiarize his idea. It is 13 days until the marathon. I can certainly begin to focus on the race by thinking of 2 important people a day (a good practice in its own right) and asking them which mile they'd like. In fact, I could probably think of 2 people per mile.....

Which should, I hope, take the mind off the aches and pains.

Fuzzy (II)

It was a full weekend. 1:13 on Monday morning and I'm just now winding down.

Next week just gets fuller. Which means it is probably time to stop typing and start sleeping if I'm even going to pretend to prepare for the onslaught.

Nonetheless, a bit earlier I was online chatting with Bill - my guy who gives guy advice, whom I normally converse with during working hours but who on this evening logged on to harass me for not having written an entry yet this weekend.

So I got going a bit, telling him about the date I had Saturday night with NTBTW. And then the date I had tonight with the Artist.

Neither would be called bonafide hits. Tonight particularly. I don't know if it was because I was ambivalent towards The Artist and couldn't fake it, or was just correct that we lacked chemistry despite concerted efforts to get it started. (Including when he rested the side of his hand ever-so-casually on my thigh as we drove back to the train station....which I shook off by faking a calf stretch-and-shift....)

Maybe tonight I realized how much energy it takes to go on 3 dates in 1 week with 3 different guys -- even if I were getting enough sleep. Focus is perhaps a bit fuzzy. As I suggested to Bill:

"I know I'm at a point where I've got a lot of doors open and should probably start closing a few, but the path is not abundantly clear at the moment. Which makes me reticent to close down anything."

Well, I know I can write The Artist a thank you while suggesting the spark just wasn't there. (Which I have to believe he should already know if he got the calf-stretch hint. ) That does simplify.

Saturday night I went out to dinner in the Back Bay with NTBTW -- who I'll switch to calling The Egoist. Not because I deduce he is one. But he has both written and said repeatedly that his big ego both helps and prevents him from certain things. Self-deprecating, perhaps.

I was tired, admittedly (as is my current default), but still considered the Egoist a good date. He deferred to me on choosing wine. Laughed at my dating tales of past woe. Took me from, in his parlance, Place X (Vox) to Place Y (Jury's) for a later cocktail. Liked my glasses. Talked politics. Listened to even more of my past woes.

So he was a good date. Was I? That's not for me to say, even if I do aim to be. I thought I was at least OK.

The Egoist e-mailed me Sunday with this spin:

"....You've got a lot on your plate right now and I don't know if your heart was totally in it last night. I'm not sure what your arrangement is with that guy but it seems to me like you're harboring feelings for him...."

I confess I don't remember which guy he is talking about.

Which means that I talked about a lot of other guys. (Oy. Yes.) Even though I realized it as I was doing it, it does mean he is correct: my head was not 100 percent on the date I was on with him....which dragged my energy off with it.

I've already said I'm sorry, and know if he did that to me I'd be royally annoyed.

The Egoist's observation is probably as good as any reason to close some doors and narrow foci, as I've already articulated. But then again, do I have to quit the rest of my life to successfully date? Only exclusively date to successfully date?

Or do I simply need more sleep?

**Update: 9:42 a.m.
Well, question at least partly answered.

I wrote to the Egoist last night about the same time I wrote this entry, saying much of the same thing. (See above: "I'm sorry"). He wrote back already this morning, at length. He fully agrees that I talked too much about my dating life. He believes I don't know what I want. So he's going to pursue his other options, of which he also has several.

Perhaps the pot calling the kettle grey? Perhaps. But he is just being honest...and hardly malicious. It's all good.

Onward and upward.

**Update 1:54 p.m.
Code issues with today's original post caused problems viewing from Internet Explorer. After some sleuthing and good advice I reposted under a new name and I think it's all set now. Sorry for confusion. And sorry, KLK, to have lost your original comment. I do need more sleep, that is a given. -- K

Midnight run

I left my house at 11:41 p.m. for a run and returned at 12:16 a.m.

Wish I could say it was a glorious affair. That the 35 minutes of jogging shook the slugs out of my quads and shins. That they, too, cleared the headaches of a tense workday, delayed trains, and then an even tenser rehearsal.

Alas, no. The legs are heavy and aching. The mind is still full. The hour is late and a pot of pasta boils on the stove for a snack. Sleep, as ever, doesn't come easy tonight even when all my cells collectively scream for it. And tomorrow is another long day.

Still glad I went, though.

Liked the foggy, moody Southie I found tonight. After the bacchanalia of St. Patrick's Day around here, it is a marvel to run first Broadway from one end to the other, then circle back on 3rd Street and for that last mile from Independence Square, street lights creating a tunnel to run through, not meet another pedestrian or moving car....

Until the final block before home: the moment where Southie reminded me I was dealing with Southie. The moment a car first honked once, then again, longer, then slowed down as it passed, passenger hanging out the window yelling, "What the f*** you doing? It's too late to be running. Go f*** yourself!"

It probably says something --what? who knows?--that his edict only made me smile, wryly. It was a tough day, and a tough run.

I can deal with the toughs.

*Thanks to UH for the shout-out.

On the last day of spring training....

....look whose loyalties have changed.

Henry, March 2009.

Henry, April 2009.

Blogger's Bible: Subject Awareness

Three of the 4 men on my active dating radar are also, simultaneously, reading my blog about my active dating radar.

There are advantages to this.

1) Eliminates need for polite social conversation.

Excerpts from my recent instant messenger conversation with MWPWaSD....or, as we have now discussed, NTBTW (Not To Be Trifled With):

K: Good week-end?

NTBTW: i'll give it a solid B+.....i'd ask about yours but you've done me the favor of spelling it out for the world

K: Sigh. I know.

K: Know that I just give the people what they ask for.

NTBTW: you're a humble servant to the greater good of the populace

We then went on to have an involved conversation about why, exactly, he employed a "gangsta" tone of voice when chatting with me (calling me "grrrl", etc.) and what pop-culture era that word represented.

Now if we could just find him a name that doesn't take 20 seconds to say out loud.

2) Keeps other current dates on their toes.

This is either good or bad.

I met up with Audacious Man last night after all. He texted me just shy of 5 p.m. to say that he had moved back his West Coast Financing call and he wanted to keep our drinks date. So we met at Charley's Saloon on Newbury for a beer and intro....then over to Bukowski Tavern for more 8.5% beer and my first ever hamburger topped with peanut butter.

And some wicked conversation. As in wicked rapid-fire. As in wicked direct. As in I often hadn't finished my answer to a question before he had another. Audacious Man is as audacious in person as his name suggests. He kept me on my toes and I think I stayed on them -- as well as one can at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night after 2 high-test malt beverages.

And, as I have the current luxury of being wooed by several men and the confidence that comes therefrom, our conversation fairly crackled. (I'll save the details of such for when I've had more sleep and less work to do.) He was also free with his compliments and provided me a taxi ride home.

I think Audacious Man is trying to play it cool that he has read my blog since first tracking it down a couple weeks ago. Although last night when I was explaining an interaction with the CFO on our last date, he said something akin to, "so that's what 2 hours of making out at your apartment was all about. "

So I have a tidbit of leverage, should I choose to employ it