welcome, CMB!

excellent news!!! my niece has now joined our family! YAY!!! we welcomed candelaria margot beatty at 11:45PM, 5 Oct. 2005. as for her name, i think mia and geoff are aiming to honor each of their mothers, and we're going to call her clara. they win the award for most deliciously thought out baby names. wow.

anyway, i'm really very excited to meet little clara, and i'm also curious as to how manny and benicio are taking this Very Big Change in their lives. i think the boys will be fine. they'll be fine, that is, until i teach clara to be the most subversive little sister in history. ;)

oh, and 9 MORE DAYS UNTIL THE MARATHON!!!!

no running today. i'm quite tired, and i want to rest up for some fun nights ahead. october weekends are filling up really fast! marathon, squash festival and halloween! whoa! oh, and i'm putting all opponents on notice now: i WILL win the squash-put competition. :)

standard JHU loop

nice and easy, JHU loop, so it was ~3 miles. not bad at all. again, i have to be careful because on these short ones i tend to push it when i'm really supposed to be taking it easy. oh and guess what!

10 MORE DAYS UNTIL THE MARATHON!!!!!

i almost don't know what i'll do with myself afterward...


:)

short & sweet

nice. i love the taper runs. i just did a little over two miles around the neighborhood, and it was fun because i ran the length of hickory, a street i'd never run before. i did: elm to 34th to hickory to 40th to 41st to beech to 37th to chestnut and home. easy. woo! my calves were a little tighter than i expected, but overall i felt fine.

12 DAYS UNTIL THE MARATHON!!!!!!!!!! :)

running mess

so this is cool. i'm hella sore, but today was a good run. actually, thursday was extremely good, except i was dumb. so thursday, i decided to get in a good 5 miles--up elm, over 41st to roland to northern and then just back down roland. normally i take that pretty slowly, just to relax. but. i felt very good, so i just thought i'd take it. i ended up doing the 5 in 40 min, which is a match to my 5 mile race PR. que the hell? i was a little winded afterward, but not like i'd be after a race PR. excellent. the only thing is that that was a dumb thing to do so close to a long run. even though i stretched and everything, i was tight for this morning's 11. we met at this little podunk diner in an obscure corner of the city, and we did most of the half marathon course. DAMN HILLEN!!! but anyway. it only took about 1:55 to do it, so that was really good. that's about a 10:45 pace, and i'm very happy with that. it was a big help to have guilford be entirely downhill. after hillen. fuck hillen. i have run that road i don't know how many times in the past few months, and it's a bitch of an incline. even for me. and i cut my teeth on the ridges in PA. i hate hillen. i do know it's good for me though, since it'll be miles 20-21 in the marathon IN TWO WEEKS, so i'll know what to expect, mentally and physically. sort of.

two weeks. i can't wait. it's slowly settling in. this taper is really nice. and that 20 miler last week was a huge confidence boost. even though i ended up doing the majority of it by myself, i felt a lot better because of the large group that was there. so 20 last week, 11 today, 8-10 next saturday, and then THE MARATHON ON THE 15TH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! wow. mom and dad will be there, i'll see some of the terprunners, my friends will be there along the course, and then there's the best-- chris is going to be there at the finish line. :) yay! i don't know if he realizes it, but that's a big deal to me. we've been dating for almost a month now (it's gone by so quickly!), and knowing that there's a big hug waiting for me at the end is a great boost (and incentive!).

i am preparing for the post-race let-down by scheduling a race afterward. i'm going to do the mardi gras half marathon in new orleans. i was thoroughly amazed that it's still going forward as planned, but it's going to be a great race--very emotional, i think. the people who organize it are taking all the funds from the race and giving them to the families of law enforcement lost in hurricane katrina. i'm still trying to imagine how they're going to handle everything logistically, but i really hope that it goes off well. it just seems like it needs to. this is when i feel really good to be part of a community that is so passionate and fanatical--we'll do whatever it takes, and we can accomplish a lot and raise a lot of money by doing what we love. this will be a great next step for me.

and chris is going to be at my finish line in two weeks. :)

short run

so i guess the terprunners' site is down indefinitely, so this is going to be my running log now. awesome. today was pretty easy, mostly because i was having a hard time getting my butt out of bed again. did a standard roland--cold spring--charles--BMA--remington--chestnut, for ~4.3 miles or so. didn't feel good/bad/awesome or anything like that. i'm just glad that i went out and did it. my psyche needed it...

twenty miles!

so wow. saturday was brutal but awesome. i jumped in on the marathon course run (thank you, Jim Adams & Falls Road Running!), and did the twenty mile course loop. holy (*!#&%^!!!!! i did it in about 11min. mile pace, for a grand total of 3:45. that'll put me on track for a ~4:45 marathon. woo! i can't believe i did it. unfortunately, even though there were about 200+ runners, i still ended up between clusters of runners and consequently did the last 15 miles on my own. dammit. i don't know how i keep doing that. i will say, however, that that is making me mentally tougher. hella tough. i made it. we started at patterson park at the butt crack o' dawn and the course went as follows:

linden (i think) to madison to washington to st. lo to harford to hillen to 33rd to guilford to 28th to st. paul/light to montgomery to hanover to fort to ft. mchenry to towson to marriot to hull to fort to lawrence (i missed woodall) to key to light to pratt to president to lancaster to caroline to aliceanna to boston to linden

http://www.thebaltimoremarathon.com/exec/baltimore/pdf/2005map.pdf

that's the new course loop, btw. i'm bitter that they took out the hampden loop. why the hell can't they finish falls road in time? instead, we're going through druid hill park like normal and then cutting over to st. paul and heading down. they've put in a loop inside ft. mchenry, which is kind of cool. i like running next to water. except for when there are cutting winds off the harbor, it's pretty relaxing. so anyway, i guess i'm pretty psyched, especially now that i know that i can do 20 miles without falling to pieces. and, val probably won't be able to come run with me, but i don't think i need that anymore. i did the 20 miles by myself on saturday, so since there will already be people around me, i know that i don't need somebody with me specifically. YAY!!! what makes this even better is that there will be people out there to support me. mom and dad are coming down. they're kind of like my pit crew, i think. and then kristie and steve said they'd be somewhere to cheer me on. and kate said that she'll walk toby to a part of the course, and they'd cheer for me. and, best of all, chris is going to be at the finish line. yay! :)

what the hell

i am so frustrated this week. every night since last thursday, i have had the worst time trying to get to sleep, and i have been waking up between 1 and 3AM and being awake for at least 2 hours. that blows! i really don't mean to be, but i can be kind of a bitch if i don't get all my sleep...

it's all chris's fault.

so what's going on right now? church on 9/11 was tough. the 9AM service was packed more than usual, and everything went faster. tom skipped the sermon, and instead we did responsive prayers that were adapted for both 9/11 and hurricane katrina. see, i remember exactly where i was that morning four years ago. i was asleep when the phone rang, and i did everything i possibly could to roll over in bed and ignore it, but it just kept ringing and ringing. so i pick up, and derek is vehemently insisting that i turn on the news. i do, and there's the horrible footage of the first plane hitting the WTC. and then, as the cameras were trained on the scene, i saw the 2nd plane hit. i just kept saying "oh my God, oh my God..." it got worse as they showed people hanging out of windows and some jumping to their deaths. and then the towers collapsed. i saw it all. i can't imagine even being there--it must have frantically traumatic and horrifying. and then they didn't show how the third plane crashed into the Pentagon, and nobody really knew right away about the fourth one that crashed in Pennsylvania. then, in 2002, i was in NYC and went to the WTC site. it was this huge gaping hole. thousands of people had died, and nothing was left, except for the steel beams that had fallen and formed a cross. i still choke up when i think about that. God, how can that happen here? we seem to think that we're above it all, that we're invincible, that we rightfully dominate the world. but we're not. and our heart is cut out in the process.

okay, so i didn't think i was going to get this serious. it was interesting last summer, when i gave a paper at a conference in Leeds. i was comparing the rhetoric of George Bush's speech to a joint session of Congress to an article written by Don DeLillo. three years after, my international audience could not understand why my entire country was devastated, when the horror occurred in only two cities and in a rural field. and this summer, practically exactly a year after that conference, london exploded. it made me wonder how my British listeners were doing and if and how they were changed. now i think there's a more global awareness of civic vulnerability. so what are we going to do about it?

here. you need to read this--> http://www.jwp4.netfirms.com/delillo.html

FRIENDS!!! :)

this is ATV Courtney. she's dangerous. we met ? years ago, both working at *)!&^%!-ing Cambridge in Columbia, and i'm so excited that we're friends. for the first 6-ish months of our friendship, our lives were weirdly parallel w/ family and relationship stuff, and we helped each other through some really tough times. if i could pick a sister, she'd be one!


this is steve. boflex. don't ask. anyway, he's another weird person, mostly because if i hadn't moved to PA while i was in elementary school, i would have ended up going to high school with him. strange thing, huh? when we met our freshman year at UMBC, we found out that his best friend had been my best friend in third grade. luckily, he and i have OTHER things in common. really though, he's one of my best friends, and he's one person who is very honest with me. a stand-up guy.


this is kate and dom. kate is my housemate, and dom is one of her best friends and becoming a fast friend of mine too. finding kate on craigslist was the luckiest thing--we really clicked, and now we have the most fun. and she loves toby, which is very important. :) dom is a great guy, and in the first week that we knew each other, we got to be good buddies. he, like steve, is very frank, and he's really good at giving a shoulder to lean on. yay dom!



these are some of the terprunners. unfortunately, i don't know the girl in the pink top. but otherwise, it's (top row) pat, liz, alvin, erik, val, jen & nick, and (bottom row) lauren, tom & samy. when i first came out to the club, i really felt like the old lady because all of these guys are undergrads, but when we got out on our runs, it totally didn't matter, and i ended up being good friends with val and samy. with their support, i was able to rediscover my love of running, and val is absolutely so helpful with my marathon training. fantastic!

"Sssh!" by Fleming & John

anybody who hasn't heard them needs to hear them. she's awesome, and her husband is amazing on guitar. cool.

so this week was a bitch & a half. it's weird. i have bipolar disorder, i know that i always survive, and i know the ways to cope when i have a bad episode, but all of that is meaningless when something comes up and rides me. and i have no idea what i'm supposed to do or what it means, and i always spiral back to where i started. i'm not sure what progress i make in life sometimes.

on a happier note, here's a fantastic Korean idiom passed along by matt-a-tat: "The dog covered with excrement laughs at the dog covered in chaff." - The pot calling the kettle black. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

i've given up on jose saramago for the time being. i loved blindness, but history of the siege of lisbon is too hard. even for me. ugh. that sounds irredeemably conceited, but seriously. i battled with saramago's passion for metaliterature, and i just can't hack it. i'm just not po-co enough. and i guess i never will be. i'm trying to figure out what i should read next. i have machiavelli sitting on my shelf, right next to plato, and i also have some middle english arthurian legend. i don't think i have anything *new* up there. i'm such a bad example--there are so many books in the "canon" that i haven't read, but i hate a lot of those authors. twain? ick. don't get me started on twain. maybe if i put the stupid laptop down once in awhile, i'd get into some of these books...

overdue update

pics that should have been on here from the start:

this is toby dog, trying to drive my parents' van.



me & nici. :)

a fond farewell

okay, so this is last year in vegas. fun was had by all. and by all, i mean me.
:)

this is dustin washing out the yard-long drink thing before we catch our flight home. they're so smart that they give you this harness to wear around your neck so that you don't have to exert yourself by carrying the thing up and down the strip. it's kind of like a feedbag, except you would call it a drinkplasticthing. one of the more entertaining moments of my trip.

so, dustin is leaving maryland soon for his new job. i'll miss ya. viva ohio!

church family

Second Presbyterian is my church home, or as Kim's song goes, my second family. i sing on the worship team for the 9AM service, and although dragging myself out of bed for our early practices before the service can be tough, it's completely worth it.

i've been a Presbyterian all my life, but it wasn't until life happened that i really started to search in my faith. basically, when i was 16, clinical depression started to set in, but at that time, nobody in my family really recognized what was going on, so we just thought i'd get over "the blues." well, over the next few years, it just grew and grew, and, on top of other life events, everything just got out of control. i was formally diagnosed and underwent treatment, but the thing about depression is that it starts to tear away at your cognitive abilities. it's hard to understand what's reality and what's not, and you beat yourself up for not being able to tell the difference.

so, what was once just a set of memorized verses and litanies started to become thorns in my side. i've wrestled with God to the very depths, and i was extremely furious when my diagnosis changed to bipolar disorder. sure, it explained my deep, dark lows, as well as my frenzied ability to write two papers in two days, but i was angry with Him. since i was young, i'd seriously prided myself on my intellectual abilities, but it seemed that my illness rendered that moot. i was upset because it seemed that my intellect was targeted. i was distraught because i became too emotional to be involved in all of my activities. i was enraged because it took away my ability to handle and participate in track and field, something i'd done for nine years.

most of all, i was terrified of what was happening to me.

the amazing thing that i've learned in my struggles with God is that these times call us to open up and depend on Him. depression makes you think that something is very wrong with you, that you are unworthy of any kindness or even recognition. so you withdraw and even deny yourself anyone else's attempts to help you. but He doesn't let go. and after i'd exhausted myself with yelling and sobbing and fighting, i had nothing left but to let Him in. so now i know what it means to be grateful to
and accepted and loved by God. i don't think i would have truly understood that had i not been through the first years of my illness.

i still don't know what all of this is about. and sometimes it's very hard to describe to my friends and family what it is to own the illusion of the jekyl and hyde (sp?) abomination. but i think what it can do is comfort others who are in the same situation; maybe they too can know grace and hope. and maybe people who do not have this illness can learn about it, at least a little, and can learn to exercise compassion and a willingness to sit with an afflicted friend.

i may not be able to express it so well, but my faith and my church are essential to and first in my life. Second Pres. really is my second family.

*oh no you di-int!!!*

right now, matt's in korea. we miss matt. anyway, he's the only one i know who can do the grabby joke and not get decked. this picture heralds all the way from 1998, his freshman (my sophomore) year at UMBC. and once i get the 2000 pic scanned, you'll see matt in his polyester liesure suit finest. and me dressed as a disco ball. lovely.

thank you, annie liebowitz. :)

more pix--grad student halloween, 2004

so you thought academics were stiff nerds. suckers! these fabulous people are exactly that--fabulous. what is jess's costume? can you guess? i'll give you a hint--anyone who was 5 in the 80s and loved little plastic horses... no? haven't you ever heard of MY LITTLE FREAKIN PONIES?!!! philistine...









and here's groucho mike marx. marks? marx? i have no idea. anyway, mike loves henry james. he must be drunk.











this is margaret, dressed as some little girl from a book about little girls. she wore bloomers. and showed them to us. with her is karen, dressed as the *green-eyed monster*. can ya guess what that's from? i'll give you a hint--it's a Shakespeare reference. from a play with a black dude, a virgin and a hell-bent bastard. still nothing??? Othello, you. and, you get 10 bonus points if you knew that the green-eyed monster is jealousy personified. not only do we scholars know how to party (read: get drunk really fast and have no clue what we're doing), but we also have very intellectual costumes. awesome.




and lastly, with no shame at all, here's me, with my amateur attempt at a costume. i don't even remember what i was supposed to be. any clues? and no, the streamers were not part of the original costume.

sleeplessness and family

so once again, i can't sleep. i think it's because i watched "super troopers" with court and wadassie. we were up late laughing, and so now i'm wide awake. oh, and i can't get people off my mind. that happens with me. and i've got songs in my head. hopefully this will all go away so that i can be awake for the early service later this morning. where i have to sing. and be sort of a worship leader. eep.


here is my brother Geoff and his family, in a picture from Benicio's 2nd birthday. we all went to see Polar Express, and then we ate lunch in a train. seriously. we really did. anyway, from L to R, it's Geoff, Manny Day, Benicio and Maria. if i had to say, i'd think that Manny is a lot like my mom, in that, already at age 4, he's very musical. Benicio is like my dad because he's crazy about trains. Geoff is an artist and a teacher, and his animation is amazing. Maria is an at-home mom who writes poetry and teaches a Bradley class (a birthing method).



this is my cousin Rachel and my grandpa (my mom's dad). although she looks all grown up and mature now, just ask Rachel about our little fashion show at the beach. :) and grandpa is amazing--at 86, he volunteers at hospice each week, is active in his church in FLA and takes good long walks every morning. oh, and ten years ago, he got his LPN certification and worked as a nurse in a nursing home. this is after being a Navy man, teaching at a trade school and climbing around on roofs, helping my uncle with construction. amazing.

there will be more to come with my mom, and hopefully at some point i'll have a picture of her mom scanned and posted. i'll also try to get courtney, steve "bo flex" handy, matt-a-tat molter, laura, kate, marc, samy, val and jody and ed and jess and... stay tuned...

more family

this is my dad and his parents. they're awesome. grandma and grandpa are both 86 and still independent and still spoiling their grandkids (that includes me) and great-grandkids. my grandfather, Donald R. Beatty, was an Army sergeant in WWII and was part of the forces that set up the beachheads before the Allied armies invaded Italy. he saw some pretty hellish stuff. when he got back, he worked for bethlehem steel as a photographer. now that he's retired, he's a gadget geek and loves his computer.

grandma, Millie L. Beatty, grew up in middle-of-nowhere Oklahoma and survived the great depression. she and her parents and two brothers lived in a tent for a good long while. she's great because she has taught me so much about my family. her maternal grandmother (my great-great-grandmother) was a Cherokee named Six Killer. she also helped my grandfather write a history of the beatty family, and while we don't have anything more than oral evidence to corroborate (sp?) it, we have reason to believe that our line of beattys has been in the U.S. since Revolutionary times.

and then there's my dad, Donald E. Beatty. none of this junior or beatty II stuff for him. he's retired army national guard, having been a helicopter pilot for YEARS. he's a vietnam vet, and i've been privileged to share some of his stories and ceremonies and everything. at this point, he's loving his roles as church trustee president, air museum docent, and grandpa and dad. he also gets his honey-do list and helps mom out a lot.

it's one of those situations where i love my family and absolutely am so lucky to have them.

dad and nici

this is my dad and Benicio. my dad's an awesome grandfather--he's hilarious with little kids. and Benicio. i love that kid. i have the best nephews ever. and you thought yours were awesome. :)

i want one.

http://www.pontiac.com/g6/index.jsp

yummy.
:)

wtf?

that helicopter crash in afghanistan really freaked me out. there was the strong possibility that a friend of mine was there, and i hoped to God that he wasn't. thankfully, he wasn't, but it was a big blow to him and his community. i have a high regard for those who will put their lives on the line so that we can continue to have the liberties that are singular to our country. and for him to do what he does, i respect him quite a lot.

and then there's the london bombing yesterday. i was there a year ago, at a conference where i delivered a paper on 9/11. one of my listeners asked how the entire country could be so traumatized over something that happened only in three locales. and now, what a gross and disgusting irony.

the lady and i didn't stay in touch, and i can only wonder what she's going through now. it doesn't matter that the scales of the attacks are different. what does matter is that it really pisses me off. it's plain that every generation experiences something that really fucks up their world--that's no newsflash. but i just can't wrap my mind around it. i'm sitting in my living room, having the great things that i have, and there are people out there just like me getting blown to pieces just for riding the wrong double-decker bus.

i'm not naive. we're an incredibly violent species. but i find the mixture of the glorious and the profane very disconcerting. and somewhere in there, there's room for mercy and grace. this is where it's very easy to get cynical and angry. but i'm no nihilist either. we do have our redemption. i see it in my nephew Manny. he was born only two months before 9/11, and that day, i remember being terrified for him because of the world that he was going to grow up in. but his tiny fingers, bright little face and baby growls--he was the one who soothed me. i really believe that Christ gives us the ability to embody grace for each other, and that, however hard it may be to see and believe, is our victory. our potential to receive and live in that grace undermines everything these people do.

and thanks to those who fight to give that grace. we all miss you.