Being Seen

I’m a very difficult person to live with. I can be sullen and withdrawn and maudlin and, even when I’m doing the dishes or cooking dinner and you try to talk to me, I can be miles away – years away – thinking about an ancient conversation I wish had gone differently or idealizing a future that requires zero effort for me to fix.

In short (too late) I’m a magical thinker who tends to give too much credence to my imagination and my feelings. I’m often not rational preferring to listen to my gut and to navigate the invisible reverberations of the emotions of those around me instead of saying what I need or want. I’m terrible at naming what I feel so often times I don’t even try. It’s almost always too acute or too specific and I can’t quite get a grasp of how to explain it.

Imagine the iridescence of some exotic butterfly and trying in vain to describe the brilliance of the shifting, shimmering colors as its wings catch the sunlight. Or the simultaneous strength of wings that can carry it thousands of miles but would rend like paper if you barely touched it. This is my experience of my inner self and I’m always afraid to show it to people – to tell my truth – because I perceive others as being either far less esoteric and complex or maybe they have an ability to just say “pretty butterfly” while I have to blurt out a paragraph of text as seen above.

All of which is merely a prologue for some very unhealthy behavior I’ve displayed this week. As usual I’ve taken my inner anger about my birthday – a nagging sense that no one really appreciates me for the unique person I am even while I push them all away or hide all the crazy/messy facets of myself from view – and I made rash choices. I deleted some social media while vomiting up all my insecurities and pain on another.

I didn’t fight fair. I don’t fight fair. I hurt people before I’ll let them hurt me. I deny my own feelings of longing for someone to see the authentic, original, total me by “reasoning” that if they wanted to know they’d just dig a little deeper. Just try a little harder. Just do a little bit more.

But, again, that’s not fair. I know it’s me that has to change. I know that I’m the one with work to do. I have to receive the love they could offer me more than I’m afraid of them rejecting the “me” I almost never show. I want so badly to be that vulnerable but beautiful butterfly but I’m so comfortable here in my cocoon that I don’t know what to do.

I took a long walk this afternoon. I’ve always loved feeling tired after exercise or standing in the rain or bracing against the cold. Something about feeling the physical fragility of life seems to connect me more with that interior experience that I mostly keep hidden. It helps me synthesize all my thoughts so that I can finally say what’s on my mind or show what I’ve been working on. It helps me lower my guard and realize that we’re all basically the same and that I shouldn’t fear showing myself anymore than I should fear that tired ache of exercise. I can understand the emotional ache of wanting and wishing and hoping and so I should just acknowledge those feelings too.

I feel everything so acutely. The rage at the handling of COVID-19. The anxiety about voting rights. The stress of working from home, learning remotely, and the isolation from family and friends. There are days when I feel like an exposed nerve and the only way I know how to show my family that I love them is to make dinner and clean the kitchen and try to just be as unobtrusive as I can be. I think that shrinking myself to a tiny, quiet point will mean the pain can’t get to me but my brain finds way to route around my body if given half a chance.

I don’t know what the point of writing all of this down is but I do know that I acted out the other night and it makes me feel ashamed. I also know that lots of folks reached out – privately and publicly – to check on me. I’m thankful for your messages. I’m not okay. The weight of this year is crushing and I’m running out of ways to displace that burden. Maybe I ought to just spend all day walking – taking all my meetings by phone so my body can help my soul deal with everything. Maybe I just need a good cry or yell at the universe to let all of those feelings loose.

I just know that I’ve been bottled up and that most times I try to explain what’s wrong I get angry at myself before I finish the first sentence because it isn’t coming out the right way. I spend so much time gaslighting myself that things are fine that when I finally start to snap out of it I’m mad twice – once for suppressing myself and a second time for not changing things immediately.

I’m just the slightest bit hopeful that maybe some of my less-rash decisions will make a little bit of difference. I’m not holding my breath but I’m trying to be honest. Maybe I should have more meltdowns? I honestly can’t tell anymore. I just know that I’m having a hard time and I’m trying to explain how I feel so *I* understand it.

Thanks for listening.

Last Bastion?

Is there an open web any more?
If you’re not reading this on Facebook or from a Tweet or a “link in bio” on Instagram does it even exist?
Is using an increasingly unwieldy framework like WordPress useful anymore?

I’m about at the point I’d like to either a) move to a free WordPress.com subdomain just to keep these archives, b) start over with flat HTML that I hand-edit, or c) delete the whole shebang and not look back.

This is like my arc on the social web in miniature.

Is it time to abandon the blog?

Maybe so.

Running Faster

As a result of my injury this year and subsequent treatment (getting my knee drained & a shot of cortisone), I’ve had to take some time off from running this year.

In fact I didn’t log a single mile for 7 weeks, including the entire month of October.

I’m well below my yearly average over the last 5 years but I’m just happy to be pain-free and back to the grind again.

One of the things I’d like to do better in the coming months & years is to get my speed back up to where it was before my injury and then see how fast I can get. I hate to even speak this out loud, but I’d love to run a sub-4 hour marathon by the time I hit my 45th birthday.

That means I’ve got a little fewer than 4 years to optimize my running to such a point that I’m roughly six minutes faster than my PR.

No pressure.

Now the inimitable Extraface (Dave Coustan) shared a link on his wonderful Slack1 – “Fancy Running Shoes Really Do Seem to Make You Faster“.

I’m no fan of Nike shoes (save for my dad’s original waffle trainers which were cool as hell), but the research seems pretty compelling. Wired even did their own ad hoc skunkworks study at the New York City Marathon which seems equally promising that these shoes (and potential new versions like them) have measurable performance benefits for long-distance runners.

But $250 is a lot of money to spend on shoes, especially when I try to have 2-3 pairs I rotate to keep my feet feeling fine & the treads new. Plus it’s a lot to ask runners to change their kicks, since we’re notoriously finicky and we tend to stick with a model once we find one we love.

The flip side of the coin – at least for me – is tracking and data. I love my running app, iSmoothRun, on both my phone and my Apple Watch but I’m always looking to learn more from my running data.

One way to do that is crunching the numbers more effectively. I’m this close to buying a Pro membership to SmashRun, my current favorite place to see learn about myself through statistical analysis. (I also did a fun mapping project almost exactly a year ago to the day. You should check it. It’s cool.)

The other route I could go is to get a “smart shoe” like the Altra IQ version of my current running shoe, the Torin IQ. That way I’d get to stay in the shoes I know, love & run in while getting more data. Of course I’d have to drop $220 which is almost as much as the “fast” Nike Zoom Vaporfly 4%.

Still another option would be to “roll my own” smart shoes by adding something like the MilestonePod ($30) or the Stryd ($200) to whatever pair of shoes I use. Both seem simple to setup and swap out, it’s simply a matter of how much I’d like to spend and how much more data I’d like to track.

Both units also currently work with my running app, so there’s that too.

In the end what I’ll likely do is just keep running more often. Work my way back up to my pre-injury weekly mileage and see what that gets me.

If and when I feel like I need better gear – either to track my efforts or to make me faster just by virtue of lacing up – I’ll make the change.

Until next time, see you on the road!

  1. You should join his Slack or, at the very least, subscribe to the email list that spawned the community – Three Banana Thursday – for more fantastic stuff like this.

Walmart Sued For Selling Fake Craft Beer

Remember the “craft beer” I bought at Wal-Mart and blogged about a few months ago?

Apparently not everyone could appreciate it for what it was.

More specifically they hated it so much for what it isn’t, actual craft beer, that they’re suing Wal-Mart.

I’m also just bad enough at Googling things that I didn’t realize this lawsuit dates back to February of this year, more than 6 months before I ever bought or reviewed the beer in question!

Cheers and good luck, fellow beer snobs, I guess!

On Steve Whitmire

Yesterday a regular reader of this blog (whatever that means anymore, given my posting schedule) brought up the topic of Steve Whitmire’s firing as the performer of Kermit the Frog by Disney.

He asked me, earnestly, what I thought of the whole kerfuffle and whether I’d seen Steve’s new blog.

I’ll answer reverse-chronologically:

No, I had not seen Steve Whitmire’s blog, until yesterday and now I have. Start reading it at the beginning. It’s … something.

Reading a blog – especially one of someone creative and new to blogging – can be a raw, harrowing experience. It’s clear that Steve Whitmire is a passionate person but it’s also clear that he’s too close to the situation to be a reliable narrator.

I think the real issue stems from where the line between the performer and the character is drawn. In the case of the Muppets, the performer is even more important than an actor or a voice performer. They literally inhabit the character by putting their arm inside of the felt.

For all intents and purposes Steve Whitire was Kermit.

But the problem here is that there are writers and producers and directors involved in the ongoing life of the Muppet franchise.

There were two theatrical films in the past 10 years and a (flawed) TV show. They all succeeded in some ways and fell short in others.

The first film was excellent and the second was pretty good, if uneven. The TV show never really found it’s own voice, partly due to the fact that it didn’t take advantage of any of the characterizations or storylines from the films.

But mostly the issue is that The Muppets need to evolve in order to be a sustainable, vital part of Disney’s portfolio. Steve Whitmire, by his own admissions, seems tied to a very narrow vision of the characters that was not shared by Disney, the Henson family, and potentially even some of his fellow performers.

Whatever the true issues may have been, Disney seems to have moved on and Steve Whitmire hasn’t. He’s still wrestling with how and why he was fired and my heart goes out to him.

But the fact remains that Disney & the Henson family clearly have one set of feelings about his performance and behavior and he has another. The preponderance of the evidence leads me to side with Disney, but I still sympathize with Steve over the loss of his job and empathize with him that he wants to understand exactly why things happened the way they did.

From my perspective The Muppets still need to evolve.

In a world when Kermit’s likeness has been co-opted sipping tea to indicate a sarcastic comment the Muppets have to be more contemporary than they are.

Listen, I loved The Muppet Show of my youth. There’s a reason the blog has the title it does & why I have the username “mostlymuppet” on every service imaginable.

I LOVE THE MUPPETS.

And even I know that the movies and the tv show are part of making them more relevant to people today. You can’t survive on pure nostalgia and zero character growth, just ask The Simpsons.

I just hope Steve Whitmire finds some peace. It sounds (reads) like he’s getting closer to that but it must be traumatic to lose something that you’ve done for 27 years and separate from a group you’ve been associated with since the late 70’s.

I wish Steve and the Muppets nothing but the best in the future.

I’ll be here, watching.