There’s No Place Like Home: My (Temporary) Retreat from the Land of Odds

I am the only child of doting parents who reacted with the same enthusiasm to my less-than-stellar high school track performances—“But you didn’t get lapped this time!” they’d exclaim, “You’re much faster than the girl with the knee brace!”—as they might if I became an astrophysicist, and if you asked them, they’d probably tell you I’m smart enough for that, too. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise, then, that I didn’t really experience feelings of doubt about my station in life until the summer before I moved to Alaska.

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Back in the Saddle: My Triumphant Return to Mediocrity

Days later, all this peeled off and my toe looks pretty normal now. Isn't it so gross?!
Days later, all this peeled off and my toe looks pretty normal now. Isn’t it so gross?!

When given a choice between sleeping in and being repeatedly hit in the face with ice, normal people would choose the former every time. Due to some kind of malfunction in my brain, I am drawn to the latter option, and when someone asks if I’d like to get up at the crack of dawn and endure hours of falling ice and freezing temperatures, I reply that I’ll be there with bells on. I guess my synapses aren’t firing quite as they should be.

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The Tao of Dar

Sometimes Kevin jokes that I must secretly be a much older woman. That’s kind of fair, because I drink a lot of tea and I’m usually in bed by ten o’clock, if I can help it. It’s also true because I like a lot of the same music as my mom, and by a lot I mean almost all the same music. She introduced me, at the tender age of twelve or so, to a folk singer named Dar Williams, and I have since then done my best to live by the Tao of Dar.

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