Birds and frogs'll sing all together

2004-02-18 - 7:59 p.m.

I did it. I said yesterday that "my goal is to be able to finish a jog and average less than ten minutes per mile." Well, I did it. I jogged 2.6 miles today and averaged 9:39 per mile. I think it helped that I never glanced at my stopwatch while I was running. For some reason it always makes me more tired to know how fast or how slow I'm jogging. Sometimes when I'm pushing myself hard I develop a wheeze. Usually just on the inhale. This morning while I was running I started wheezing on both inhalation and exhalation and I still had a mile to go. But apparently I can manage with a wheeze, I just have more trouble making it past people's yards without their dogs barking at me.

My main accomplishment for today was rearranging some bookshelves. I was able to condense enough stuff that I cleared off a whole shelf and a half. Then, of course, I promptly filled that space up with homeless books. Now I think all my books have a shelf somewhere--no more books sitting in stacks on the floor. I can't wait to someday have my own place with my own bookshelves and start up my very own library. I've always wanted a library like the one that the Beast had in Disney's "Beauty and the Beast." They actually had a reproduction of it in Disney's California Adventure park, so I got to walk through it. It was cool, but it just wasn't the same. For starters, it was small and also the books weren't real and there were little kids running around. Ah well, someday I will have a library and I will be able to say, "If you need me, I'll be in the library reading."

Last night I watched an episode of "Without a Trace" that we had on tape. In this episode there's a 7th grader who attempts suicide by hanging himself. It was really sad, the poor kid's plight. I totally identified with her, though, when the blonde FBI chick told her partner that when she was a kid she wasn't popular, but she still picked on the kids that were less popular than she was. I was that way too. In elementary school, at least. I think I was over picking on other kids by the time I got to junior high, but why is it that kids feel the need to pick on other kids? Since it seems that the vast majority of kids do this sort of thing, does that mean that it's genetic? It's our instinct to pick on each other? Is getting over this instinct to pick on each other something we're taught, or is that also an instinct?

Anyway, I'm having an eye problem. Last night during "Without a Trace" my eye started hurting. It felt like I'd got a piece of dirt or something in my eye, only worse. It was a sharp pain in the outer corner of my left eye. It hurt, but only intermittently, and after about an hour I went and took my contacts out. The corner of my eye was bright red. This morning I tried to put that contact back in, but that caused instant pain and I popped it out again immediately. Ergh, what's the deal? Maybe a piece of dirt did get in there and it scratched my eye or something. I'm hoping it'll be all better by tomorrow so that I don't have to wear glasses to my volleyball game.