Sigh.  I just finished today’s run, which was harder than I’d have liked, mostly because of the vast quantities of beer and ice cream I consumed yesterday in celebration of my official entry into the ranks of the real-estate-owning bourgeoisie.  But I slogged through, only to discover that the slogging was more literal than metaphorical—I took off my left shoe, post-run, to discover a sock full of blood.

I’ve got that one toenail that’s never been “normal,” that always struck me as looking somewhat deformed, and that has caused several pedicurists varying degrees of concern.  But it’s never really given me any trouble.  Just mild disgust.

Except now it’s bleeding like crazy.  But from where, I can’t tell.  This has produced enough curiosity in me that I felt like I had to let the Internet in on it.  I’m filled with questions, like, it’s not that I cut the toenail too short or something, because I last cut it nearly a week ago, and since then have done a two-mile, an eight-mile, a three-mile, a six-mile, and now a four-mile run, so why the bleeding today?  And does this mean I’m going to lose the toenail?  And if I do, will it grow back deformed again, or could I actually get a normal toenail out of the deal?

And why is it that I can have so much intellectual curiosity about my bloody toenail and yet have such a hard time finishing an article that I’ve actually been looking forward to writing?

What I’m supposed to be doing during break:

• Updating a grant proposal for our development folks
• Finishing the Media Studies program’s self-study report
• Finishing a long-overdue article on Richard Powers
• Writing a memo to the dean about a proposed educational technology center in Claremont
• Writing the critical theory apparatus for the Pearson anthology
• Reading the stack of new books I rashly decided to teach in the spring

What I’ve been doing:

• Updating grant proposal!  Hurrah!  One thing off list!
• Tinkering with self-study report without actually adding new text necessary to finish it
• Re-reading Gain for the third time in preparation for finishing said Powers paper
• Upgrading blog software, adding gallery, futzing with CSS, and generally fooling around with blog in utterly non-productive way
• Oh, yeah:  closing escrow.  Today, I think.  Which mostly results in me sitting by the phone and calling my home voicemail with a ridiculous frequency in order to find out whether anything horrible has gone wrong.

The hope is that laying it out this plainly will produce guilt and shame sufficient to get me to accomplish something work-oriented in the next week.  We’ll see how it goes.

Why is it that, at the same time I’m reading a story in which it’s announced that the death toll in the South Asian earthquake and tsunami now tops 80,000, and is expected to rise well over 100,000 before all is said and done, that my eye is drawn to a story announcing the death of Jerry Orbach?

Is it that 80,000 is just too much to comprehend?  Is my mind balking at the impossible vastness of the devastation?  Or is it the comparative invisibility of those 80,000 people in the American cultural imagination, and the relative ubiquity of Orbach in his Law & Order incarnation?

Either way, I feel about this big.  Thanks, though, to Liz, for pointing me toward more helpful responses.

According to the New York Times, Susan Sontag died today of complications from acute myelogenous leukemia.

I’m a bit in shock, I think.  Against Interpretation was one of the books that drove me back into grad school, determined to write about contemporary culture in a way both smart and approachable.  Today, what smarts I have are escaping me, and I’m left with precious little of interest to say.

I’ve been poking around all day in the recent upgrade to ExpressionEngine, which I installed yesterday.  The major add-on in this release is a new image gallery module, which I’ve decided to take advantage of.  I’m hitting a few speedbumps in the process, but I’m gradually getting the gallery online, with the most recent condo images appearing first.  Comments are open; feedback is welcome.

[UPDATE, 06.15.07: As ExpressionEngine is no more, the gallery is likewise gone. Just as well; it apparently attracted monster amounts of comment spam once I stopped paying attention to it.]

Mileage for week:  24

Number of run days:  5

Long run for week:  8

Aches, pains, complaints:  I’m much too blown up from that eight-miler, which I just did a couple of hours ago, to have any real sense of how I’m doing.  I got all the runs in, though at some considerable difficulty.  Today’s run is far and away the hardest I’ve done, and it reminds me of those weeks of training eight years ago a little more than I want to be reminded.  On the other hand, I did it, and I’m likely to feel much better in the morning.

Hear that?

…

That is the sound of the complete absence of my family from the immediate vicinity.  Let’s all just enjoy it for a minute, shall we?

…

Ahhhh.

I’m sitting in the President’s Club in the Houston airport, soaking up the free wi-fi and eating as many peanuts as I could possibly want while I gorge myself on all the blogs I could only glance at for the last eight days.  Said glancing was done on my parents’ Wintel, which just gives me the screaming meemies every time I have to work on it.  So it’s nice to be able to open up the old PB again, especially since there isn’t somebody looming over my shoulder asking what I’m doing, accusing me of being anti-social, or just plain insisting that I drop whatever I’m doing to (a) run an errand, (b) eat yet another meal, or (c) just come sit in the living room with the rest of us.

Christmas was, on the whole, a success: no major emotional outbursts, including the one evening when I was this far from screaming that everybody just needed to leave me the fuck alone and stop treating me like I’m twelve already; no illness or injury; no bloody snow.  (Who knew, incidentally, that that was one I needed to be worried about?  Houston Intergalactic is completely devoid of the white stuff on the ground, thankfully, but not far south of here, things are blanketed.) As to gifts, I got one of these, which I didn’t even know existed, but which is wholly appropriate.

Because with all the pressure I’ve been under lately, I might as well put it to good use.

Mileage for week:  21

Number of run days:  4

Long run for week:  7

Aches, pains, complaints:  This was supposed to be a 22-mile, 5-run day week, but the grading and the condo and the travel and the family interfered, so I took two miles from the 3-mile day I missed and tacked them onto a 4-mile day, running six instead.  Whatever; it worked.  I’m feeling pretty good, overall—this was my first 20-plus mile week since 1997.  No aches or pains, just stress; I look forward to running this week without obsessing about grading every step of the way.  (Of course, now I’m obsessing about tile instead, i.e., did the floor people install the wrong tile in my bathrooms and entry way, and can I figure it out, much less do anything about it, when I won’t be in Claremont for three weeks?) This week is going to be the first real running challenge of training, mostly in terms of getting away from the family long enough to run—but in case it helps anybody out there:  a marathon-training schedule is, I’ve decided, an indispensable accessory to familial relations.  “I need an hour away from you; please leave me alone” never goes over quite as well as “today’s a five-mile day; I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

Well, finished, at least.  Grades are turned in, and everything that needed to get read got read (and please don’t ask me to be more specific about that).  And just in the nick of time, as I’m now madly doing a last load of laundry and packing to leave at what R. refers to as oh-dark-thirty tomorrow morning.  But however half-assedly, and however harriedly, it’s done, and that’s good.

Though it has not come, I fear, without some damage to the old mental faculties.  Case in point:  On Sunday, when my mad burst of cleaning led to four loads of laundry being washed and dried, everything got folded and put away, except for the fourth load, a load of towels, which remained in the dryer until just a few minutes ago.  But apparently I’d begun folding it and given up after the first item Sunday night, a event I have no memory of, but only the evidential traces left behind.  Because just now, as I stood in front of the dryer, pulling out those towels and folding them one at a time, the third towel I pulled out emerged from the dryer fully and perfectly folded.  And I stood there open-mouthed for a full fifteen seconds, staring at the dryer and thinking how did it do that?

And that, dear Internet, is the end of the semester, in a nutshell.

“KF?  This is A., from the O. Company?  I know you’re coming in at one o’clock today, and I’m just calling to let you know that we had a little leak in your unit last night, but there was no damage.  We just want everything to be up front.  It was the heating unit.  The carpet got a little wet, and the wall, but there was no damage.  The guys are in with the blowers right now drying it.  We just wanted to let you know.”