25-50-75: Day 5

It's June 1st and the weather is strange.  More like fall than impending summer.  I'm happy for cool air as it makes working in air-condition-less rooms much easier, but I haven't been to the pool since Monday, and my body aches for sun and water.

Two days of training kept me from the gym, but I got a workout today, though not on an elliptical machine.

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I spent the morning boxing and moving books in our high school book room.  I've taken on this behemoth task the last couple of summers, and while it is admittedly a lot of work, I love it.  It strains my muscles, makes me curse publishers for putting out crap textbooks that become obsolete within a month of publication, and it requires me to rise early if I want to get in any pool time in the afternoon, but I love it.  Nothing is more rewarding that hauling 40 pound boxes of books around and reorganizing space to be more efficient, right?

I spent a number of years working in bookstores or working in the book sections of bigger stores, so being in three small rooms, attached by doorways, filled with floor to ceiling bookshelves, is a bit like coming home.  Today I moved 18 boxes to a classroom on the first floor, packed up 9 boxes for our district office, moved out 2 empty bookshelves, and came up with a reorganization plan that is pretty genius.  If I do it right there will be an empty room that can become my office and that would be just fan-damn-tastic.

The healthy eating thing has been tragically out of practice.  Why can't I resist the lure of chicken nuggets?  Answer: I'm too lazy to be prepared at home for needing to eat in a hurry.  So the solution is to spend some quality time at the grocery store and in my kitchen this weekend prepping healthy food I can eat on the fly.  No more excuses.

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It took me a little time to get through the most recent book, not because it was long or involved, but the short stories all had to do with cancer or divorce or relationships in various stages of decline, and those subjects are difficult for me to process.  My mom's rounds of cancer have, over the years, messed me up in ways I am still dealing with.  I just never let myself fully process how I felt when she was sick until last summer--when a major part of my life fell apart for a bit--and I was forced to sit with all my feelings and just. fucking. deal with them.  It was ugly and hard and not something I would wish on my worst enemy, but I am better for having gone through it.

That being said, if you want some cathartic sadness in your life, go pick up a copy of Mary Clyde's Survival Rates.  There is redemption in it, sort of, but you have to be willing to stretch pretty far to find it.  Which is, I suppose, why she won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction when the book came out.  Like O'Connor, nothing is easy for Clyde's characters and, by association, nothing is easier for their readers either.

Next up is Matt Bondurant's The Wettest County in the World.  It's the book the new movie Lawless is based on (which I saw a preview for whilst attending Snow White & the Huntsman today--I LOVED it).  I started this book last summer but never finished it, my head just wasn't in memoir space, but it is now, so it's on deck.

Sidebar: if you haven't seen the History channel's Hatfields & McCoys mininseries, run don't walk.  I have one more part to watch and I am absolutely hooked.  If history had been this interesting in high school, I would have been an infinitely better student.