It's Been a Lovely, Quiet Month

Today I got home from work exhausted, and wanted nothing more than to collapse on the couch with a bowl of some kind of leftovers and zone out into TV land. But I couldn't. Because I gave TV up for Lent.

I was worried that this would happen, that I would get bored around my apartment without the crutch of TV to lean on. Of course there are lots of screenless things I love to do, but TV is such a comfort food that I was worried I'd miss it. It turns out I haven't really. I've enjoyed how quiet our apartment is without it. And I've enjoyed how mentally active it makes me feel. Especially after a long day like today, it forces me to make choices about my free time, to confront the things that need to get done, and to find the energy to do the things I want to do, even if they're not as easy as plopping down in front of a good show.

That's not to say that I was ever an extreme TV watcher. But it does have a tendency to suck you in and make hours and evenings disappear. Without it, our apartment feels cleaner, our food feels healthier, and the hours feel longer. And I'm almost never bored.

I am going to start watching TV again. Mad Men is back (yes, I watched the season premier, but a loophole in the Christian calendar says that's okay), the Red Sox start a new season next week, and I need to know who's going to win the next seasons of Project Runway and So You Think You Can Dance. I can't help it, I'm a product of my culture. But before I turn it on, I'm going to remember how nice it is to have it off, and really think through whether or not there's something I'd rather be doing.

No TV for a Month--The Ground Rules

As of Wednesday, I'm giving TV up for Lent. I don't watch a ton of TV, but I'm easily sucked in and distracted by it. There are a few shows I watch regularly when they're on (Mad Men, Parenthood, Project Runway, So You Think You Can Dance--don't judge), and we often have something on in the background, like MSNBC or a baseball game. So I'm really looking forward to having the apartment full of quiet for a few weeks. I'm hoping this lets me get a lot more reading, cooking, and baking done, and maybe some other projects I've been meaning to get to.

Rules:
1. No TV of any kind during the week.
2. I can watch a movie on DVD at most twice on the weekend (no more than one a day).
3. Once the first month is over (the "Thirty Things" goal), I'm allowed to watch one TV show on Sundays, since Sunday is a feast day and isn't observed as part of Lent. I'll admit, I'm only giving myself this out so I can watch Mad Men when it premiers in March.

The first test:
The Oscars are on the first weekend I'm giving up TV. Although I haven't seen many of the nominated movies this year, so it won't be all that big a sacrifice.

The only exception:
This is only a minor exception, since I'm allowing myself a movie on DVD a couple of times a weekend. Once the DVDs of Downton Abbey I ordered arrive, my mom is going to come over for a marathon viewing of the second half of Season 2. We'll do it on a Friday night, and I won't let myself watch any other DVDs that weekend.

A big thank you to Greg for letting me do this even though it wasn't his choice to give up TV!

On a final note this week, I turned 28.5 this week. Not really a milestone, but it does mean that I have a mere 18 months to do everything else on my list.

My Belated Musical Education

I've been around music my entire life (my mom is a pianist, my dad sings in a choral society, and my brother can play whatever instrument he picks up), but somehow I didn't get the gene. Or at least for me it showed itself in my love of ballet and other dance, rather than an interest purely in music. As a result, I've heard live classical music more times that I can count at various dance performances, but I'd never been to the symphony.

Over the holidays, my dad and I made plans to see the Boston Symphony. We chose a program based as much on our schedules as on our interests, and ended up with tickets to hear Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2 and Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2. Both pieces were excellent, although I think I preferred the former. For one thing, the pianist, Emanuel Ax, was phenomenal.

The stage set for the first half of the program: Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto

One thing that really struck me was how human a symphony performance is. When you go to the theatre, the actors aim to disappear into their roles. At the ballet, the dancers seek perfection, trying to make the most difficult movements look perfectly natural. But at the symphony, the perfection the performers are seeking is entirely aural, so they sit on stage looking entirely human. The performers were all ages, in professional but individual dress (at least the women), with mostly casual and everyday hairstyles. Occasionally, after an especially rigorous section, even the first violinists would drop their arms to shake out the tension. This was hard work, done by real people, though obviously real people with extraordinary talent. 

Now, I still know embarrassingly little about classical music, so the day after the concert I went out to buy copies of both pieces on CD. I'm hoping to make this a tradition, and to slowly build a classical music library of pieces I've heard live. Seems like as good a way to educate myself as anything. 

I'm Still Doing This Thing

I haven't looked at the ol' blog since my last post in September, which was all about how life was returning to some version of normal, and I was going to get going on my list. Things didn't turn out that way, and I haven't accomplished anything on the list in the last five months. It's okay . . . I've been busy.

On the plus side, I'm primed to get two more items checked off in the near future. My dad is taking me to see the Symphony on Wednesday night, and I've decided to give up TV for Lent this year.

I'm also thinking about editing some of the goals. I'm thinking "take another academic class" is likely to turn into "take a class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education" or something else less formal, if only because I don't have any immediate academic goals and don't think I can justify the expense of a real class. And I've barely been to ballet class in months, so I can't see how I'd ever find a way to perform in the next couple of years. Ideas for a replacement goal?

Alrighty, no more updates until I've actually accomplished something.

Less Than Two Years to Go!

With the start of a new school year (and the start of a new event season at the bookstore) I always get motivated to start new projects and reorganize my days. I find myself wanting to embark on new reading goals, cook more elaborate dinners, start going to the gym regularly again, and get the apartment clean and organized. Call it the wanna-be-academic version of the New Year's resolution.

But to be honest, this year my urge to start over again mostly comes from the fact that I've hardly been home for the last couple of months. Six of the last seven weekends have been spent traveling, with the last being a mammoth weekend in Seattle, where we visited family, went to an amazing wedding for a high school friend, and got stuck two nights in Chicago trying to get home after Hurricane Irene. All of these trips were wonderful and I wouldn't trade them for anything, but Labor Day weekend was the first weekend in ages when I finally had time to sleep late in my own bed, relax around the apartment, and get a few things done. It was heavenly.

So now that things are getting back to normal around here (I'm introducing Paul Farmer at a massive sold out event on Wednesday night...who ever thought I would have a life where that was normal?), I'm back on the blogosphere. I want to say I'll be blogging every Sunday night, and checking things off my Thirty Things list like crazy, but that seems overly optimistic. So let's just say I'll be around more. And if you run into me out in the world, remind me that I have a lot of cookies to bake if I'm going to finish Great Cookies. Then request your favorite kind.

Oh, and I almost forgot: Since the last time I wrote, I had my 28th birthday. Less than two years to get the rest of my list done. Yikes!

My First 13.1

Six weeks ago I ran my first half marathon, the Run to Remember in Boston. I thought it was a good choice for a first half because it was close by, flat, and mostly on terrain I knew. It started at the seaport in Boston, headed through downtown to the Charles, along Memorial Drive to Harvard and back (the same route where I did most of my long runs), and then back through downtown to the start.

I'd trained for it for fourteen weeks, and even still I had no idea how it was going to go. After a chilly, rainy spring, the week of the race started to heat up, and by Sunday it was warm and humid. I'm not sure what the temperature was before the race, but the humidity was about 80%. Not something I deal well with.

The first half was great. Since there's a long out-and-back along the Charles, we got to see the leaders of the race on their way back while we were still on our way out. I think they were somewhere around mile 8 when I was somewhere around mile 4. Amazing!

By the time I got to mile 8, it was getting warm. It had been cloudy all morning, but the sun had come out, and there wasn't a lot of shade. Around mile 10, when we were heading back over the Longfellow Bridge, it was really hot, and you could see a lot of people pulled off to the sides, some of them being checked out by EMTs. I didn't feel great, but I never felt like I was in danger of not finishing.

Things started to fall apart for me after that. I had to stop and walk several times (before that I'd only walked through the water stops). I still never felt like I wasn't going to make it, but it was getting a lot harder. Fortunately, I was able to run the last mile or so without stopping. Seeing Greg with my father- and sister-in-law just before the finish line was a great boost, and I crossed the finish line at 2:21:13. I'd been hoping for under 2:20, but given the circumstances, I had nothing to complain about.

So now I can check off part of #10. I still want to run a marathon someday, but I don't know if it will be before I'm 30. It's a huge time commitment, and I want to be sure I can really devote the time and not injure myself. I'll get there someday, though. In the meantime, I start training for my second half marathon (hopefully the Smuttynose Rockfest Half Marathon) tomorrow. I like following a training schedule a lot, since it adds structure to my weeks, and I know I can get a better time in cooler weather. Plus, this time I'm hoping to run with some family and friends, which will be the first time I've done a race that wasn't by myself.

(In other checklist news, I've been doing a bit of baking, although not enough. Tonight's ginger macadamia nut crisps are delicious.)

A London Interlude

I fell off the blogging bandwagon this spring, but our schedule's calming back down and I'm trying to get back in a Sunday night routine. Let's see how that goes.

Although I've completed two of my goals in the last month or so (more on that later), we also just got back from an amazing vacation in London, so I thought I'd write about that this week.

I had been to London once several years ago with family, but Greg had never been and we were excited about wandering around the city and seeing the sites. We did a lot of the touristy things (Tower of London, some museums, a Thames River cruise, a West End show) but we also spent many hours just wandering the streets and taking in the city. Here are some of my favorite finds (By the way, Greg and I are bad camera owners and forgot to charge our real camera before we left, so we pretty much only have crappy cell phone photos.):

In Trafalger Square there's an amazing vertical garden that replicates Van Gogh's A Wheatfield by Cypresses. It's a little hard to see, but here's the original for comparison:

A very cool monument to women's roles in World War II.

This picture's hard to see, but it's one of my favorite random things we saw. At the intersections near Wellington Arch, between Hyde Park and Green Park, are traffic signals with a place to press for a walk light, and a couple of feet higher, a place to press for a horse crossing light. Awesome.

One of the stores near Harrod's had a massive window display dedicated to Alexander McQueen dresses to celebrate the retrospective that's current at the Met in NY. Absolutely stunning.

Other highlights of the trip included a performance of Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe (featuring Geoffrey from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air...I kid you not) and second row seats to Pygmalion starring Rupert Everett and Diana Rigg. Honestly, does it get any better than that?

I think after this trip that London is officially my favorite city I've ever visited. We had an absolutely amazing time, and we're both glad to be back home, but in the back of my head I'm already making plans for our next trip. Besides, our leftover change and Oyster cards are neatly tucked away, ready to be reused. :o)