city girl and other short confessions

the maalouf sisters have had a great two weeks. first 5k, which also happens to be a social event on every colorful-mess-loving, awesome-childhood-reminiscing, curly head's bucket list.

discovering new KC breweries and bistrots might be a daily activity for lots of people. we have always had a different approach, being submitted to two sets of numbers: calories and dollars.

the amount of motivation it took to even place an insanity video in the dvd player, the agony of required 30 hour calls to deserve your salary, the torture in repeated fittings of the new dress that simply won't zip all the way to the top, the sense of victory sliding that credit card to pay for the 80% off teal leather designer boots just made us into less frequent frequenters of the overgreased, overpriced, over-tipped for, catastrophic heartburn and guilt producing fake authentic french cuisine.

symphony in the flint hills this weekend, another bucket lister, complemented by an apple maps mishap regarding the location of fort riley. once we got to the dirt road and met with another technology trusting lost citadine, we crossed "experiencing rural living" off of our to-do lists and came back to the highway.

it's sad really, i never wanted to be a city girl. i imagine myself being able to do hard physical work. and truly connecting with nature. probably connected to a crying point once it was time to separate the baby cows from their mothers. i only know that that is done because i read it in a romance novel somewhere. here we go, city girl again. i am the cliché city girl. not so cliché in the city are we? with curly hair flying around and an exotic accent? great, solved the cliché part at least in my head.
then the intensivist nature kicks in. i panic thinking about how much time do they have to reach a hospital if they have a STEMI. there is no way they make the whole 90 mns door to cath lab. do the hospitals even have a cath lab?? does 911 even answer calls here? what about babies, deliveries, online shopping, 5000 people mega-churches, podcasts, sepsis? do they have CRRT in their hospitals? what if the preemies need ECMO?
aaaah the arrogance... the false comfort of modern medicine and the illusion of online communities.. ...
yes i realize all the false comforts i rely on and the modern lies i have believed. first step.
 as far as the whole cowboy (yes boy, not cooking cowgirl) fantasy, i will just submit to the reassuring reality that God put us where we are supposed to be. i'm sure i'll find some hay to cut, or whatever, in heaven.






 

running; from a one night stand to an engagement.

Jesus satisfies all my longings.... the hymn is stuck in my head, and popped there during today's run.. (now yesterday's run. for more information on procrastination, please refer to post #1)

now what u need to know about today's run is that it was not craved but just on the schedule. the Q 2 days run intermittent with occasional insanity abs video and various older shaun-t videos schedule.

 

my favorites videos are when i feel my time is optimally invested, when more than two and the half muscle groups are being worked out (never mind that i am so exhausted that i end up vegging out in front of the Tudors, wasting a quintuplet of the time that i would have spent doing ten biceps curls), i am thankful for a cyber-trainer who understands my need for multitasking in a disorganizedly to-do listed life. 

 

anyway, that self inflicted workout schedule left me exhausted at the end of may, and excessive unrealistic ambition only reaped lack of  application.

it was not helping that the little clinical work i had to do at the hospital gave rise to endlessly eclectic to-do lists of studying, organizing my beloved closet, completing the shoe collection picture catalogue, updating my iTunes music collection into a multitude of playlists. all of the above currently half-done at best. the tragedy therein lying not in unfinished useful tasks, but rather the impossibility of crossing them off the to do list in brightly teal markers.

re-reading Romans that i just finished with my community group, and rewriting Romans notes mixed with a Romans study guide stolen from the laundry room in our st. louis apartment complex, started off as a to-do list and brought much joy and enjoyment, and has now got to find the time to fit into all of that.

digressing again r we? running, you're writing about running.

the whole running business started as i decided, one night with no moonlight, that i'd be doing the insanity videos one year from now. that sounded like a very maturely realistic time frame and far enough to alleviated any low self esteem ideas of i could never do that.

insight also kicking in about my poor exercise tolerance, and wanting to do the insanity videos, like all normal insane people do without pausing the video every 5 minutes. or maybe everyone does but the image in my head is the one I think I need to achieve, and not the realistic average of an experienced community. (average... i would refuse any such description on pure principle!...)

 i needed to increase my exercise tolerance and make myself breathe longer. VO2 max. i only leaned that term when it applied to me and not to my patients as a part of my education. i will treat you only of you suffer from a disease that interests me. or that i had time to read about in the midst of my life improving, God serving life. He couldn' t have possibly meant for me to serve him through absurd physics equations and boring disease concepts...

to make myself breathe better, i went for a run. low expectations and no experience made up my baseline of running for one minute .

hey at least i had overcome my worry of what people are going to think with the red face, sweat drenched, poor-form-one-minute-runner. yes i ran outside . i was already proud of that particular gutsy move

God might have been changing my heart from the time i used to make fun of 5-am-snowy-days-runners to that out-of-the-blue decision to Insanitize , to the ridiculous thought that running could be  just a bridge to that, and not a new love in itself.

changing my heart to the point of craving the next run twenty-four hours after the last run, apart from it being scheduled, (i only disobey the schedule for Jesus) or more accurately the set of one-minute-painful-slightly-faster-than-fast-walking-from-one-telephone-pole-to-the-other shows. 

to the point where i took a class, bought expensive running shoes , not on sale. i, the one whom without Jesus would be finding her identity in her elaborate outfits, and the pleasure of finding designer deals, mysterious discounts and colorful outfits.

today's run is that it was not craved but just on the schedule because my romance with running hit its first bumps on the road. but God redeems what He has created, and what he has deemed to be good.

running and i made up and are more in love than ever.