scatterbrains

Apologies for the lapse in posting--it's been a rough couple of weeks. That said, there's really nothing that's happened that makes for good reading, so I'll just do what I usually do when I don't have a story: post a collection of unrelated thoughts and hope that they're interesting.

I'm seeing more and more runners in my neighborhood wearing these strange little footie-glove-shoes. They're legit running shoes--they're actually supposed to be better for your feet than sneakers. The design is, I believe, based on the running technique of people who normally run barefoot. I know there's a particular native group in Mexico where runners can go barefoot a hundred miles at a time or something staggering like that, and there are plenty of other places in the world, like Africa, where it's normal to be barefoot all the time. The thing is, when you run barefooted (or rather, when you learn to run barefooted, and never run in shoes), you hit the ground with the balls of your feet, which results in almost no impact to your joints. When you run in sneakers, you hit the ground with your heels, and actually incur two to three times more damage. I'm wondering if I can un-learn the way I run now and try to put more of the impact of my stride on the balls of my feet. I'm guessing that I will trip a lot, but it might be worth a few scraped knees now to avoid joint or cartilage problems in twenty years.

I'm searching for jobs, and so find myself on Craigslist a lot of the time in the hopes that something will have popped up in the "part time" or "creative gig" category. In the course of my Craigslist trolling, and thanks to a category of transaction that Amanda called to my attention, I have come to the following conclusion: if I never find a job, it might actually be just as lucrative for me to sell my underwear to strangers on Craigslist. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

My project for the week is to clean out the pantry and all of my kitchen stuff in preparation for packing it all up, and I'm a little scared of what I might find at the back of the shelves and under the sink. On the plus side, discovering new life forms might benefit my academic career. Or endanger my health. Which reminds me, I'm out of Lysol.