Desperate Housewives

Today was the first really hot weather run of the season.  I went out at 6:30pm for a very easy nine, and it was still around 88 degrees.  I wore a bunch of sunblock and didn't push it.  Here's a plug for spray sunblock.  It's extremely important to protect your skin.  Don't forget your legs and face, too.

Tammi and I spent the weekend in New England where I delivered a conference paper - the paper was well received, and the session productive; we were able to go for some fun runs along a really nice river, as well as spend some quality time watching TV from a cushy hotel bed.  Nervous about the paper, I had a hard time sleeping the night before and woke up wide-eyed an hour before my 6am wakeup time, when I planned to go for a run.  On a little less than 5hrs sleep, after some of the in-house coffee maker's weak filter-packet coffee, I left the room at 5:20 for a solid 80 minutes, during which I saw more people than I would've expected out for  early weekend morning runs.

The reason I ran late in the day today is because I stayed up til 1:30 last night watching Desperate Housewives, a surprisingly funny, fast-moving show that's part murder mystery, part comedy, part domestic drama, part suburban gothic.  It puts into delightful comic soap-operatic form the four-character Sex and the City formula: neurotic redhead, do-gooder burnette, horsey blond with problems relating to men; Samantha's comic promiscuity is replaced by Eva Longoria's devil-may-care attitude toward mothering.  (DH corrects SATC's all-white-girl racial obliviousness to reflect contemporary American demographic realities, it nevertheless replaces Samantha's stock lusty-dame character with hoary stereotypes of Hispanic families: a domineering patriarch, a lax mother who lets her fat prepubescent daughters mess up the house, eat whatever they want, and watch whatever trash TV they want.)  Each episode moves quickly in and out of separate plots lines centering on each character.

Like its sister comedy Weeds, DH updates the durable American genre of the suburban gothic. The gothic has always, after all, been about houses, ever since the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto; it's based around the idea that enclosed spaces enclose secrets, that appearances don't match reality.  In the twentieth-century U.S. this genre takes off in the 40s and 50s with The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, but also, more familiarly perhaps, Updike's Rabbit trilogy.  Rabbit, Run mixes in a lot of 50s-existential angst (Rabbit's last name is Angstrom), but you have to remember that despite Updike's well-wrought prose and sophistication and overwritten sex scenes, it's a novel that begins with the main character running through a graveyard and ends with his drunk wife, an example of the desperate housewife who in her physical confinement and mental isolation is a staple protagonist of the suburban gothic, drowning her baby.  In novels, houses always function as shiny symbols of the status quo that conceal turmoil within, but in TV shows from the 50s-90s, the inside of the house sets the stage for sitcom comic resolution, and serves as a repository of family values.  The placid outside is matched by a placid inside.  (Perhaps an exception to this division is the daytime soap--but the soap, of course, is a key genre ingredient of DH.)  The genius of DH is to take the novel's gothic approach to the interior of the house and put it in what's really soap-opera sitcom form.

DH takes the gothic very seriously.  In another nod to SATC, it begins and ends with pat voiceovers.  But instead of the voiceovers being the embarassingly bland musings of ambivalent exorbitantly dressed wanna-be writer Carrie Bradshaw, we have the ghostly voice of a Wisteria Lane suicide, a housewife whose despair took the extremest form.  By playing with the various forms despair can take on the spectrum between lethality and comic triviality, the show achives an engaging balance of melodrama, comedy, and utter weirdness. 

Last thing: I think of the show and its companion show Weeds as a response to the housing mania of the mid-00s.  Everyone's obsessed with real estate, there's a renewed interest in the exurbs and the suburbs--the suburban genre again has its moment.  But what DH captures perfectly is the extreme weirdness of the magical thinking characteristic of the moment, the idea that anything and everything can and will happen in the suburbs, the instead of being a place of placidity and stability the suburbs are turbulent, dynamic, dangerous.  Despair went both ways in the housing boom as first it was desire that was desperate, a yearning to have a bigger house with all the psychological and (so people thought) financial benefits it would entail.  Suburban houses truly were investment vehicles--places on which to wager the future of your money and your future hopes for achieving the suburban norm; when things turned, the despair took a far darker turn.

skipping

I don't feel like running this afternoon.  I'm in the middle of writing, and I have somewhere to be at 6pm. 

I always worry, though, that if I skip, I'll lose the habit and then bad consequences will ensue.  Then suddenly I'll no longer be a runner.

It feels wrong to leave this conference paper with the sticky ending un-stuck, then again, I know come 8pm I'll feel simultaneously lazy and jumpy if I don't go out.  But I know that I won't have time tonight to work and I need to crack corn now.

Another argument for morning running--which has been very hard to do lately, because of good habits broken.  Stay up too late, then it's hard to go to bed early, then it's hard to get up early enough to run, and so on.  Anyway, this is how I take my rest days--leave 'em unplanned, and let life tell you when to rest. 

And sometimes I skip to remind myself that I can, just to keep running in perspective so I don't become so obsessed that I can't skip a workout. 

Back to the writing...

Lance

No, not Lance Bass, Lance Armstrong.  A doper?  Looks like it.  It's pretty hard to believe he didn't dope if everyone he beat was also doping, but one thing to think about in this whole sad episode is why we were all so inclined to trust him, so inclined to want to believe he was clean.  There's a good article in the New Yorker that's apposite.  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2011/05/say-it-aint-so-lance-armstrong.html

opinions: we all have them, just as we all have navels

I'm writing a lot about Charlotte Perkins Gilman these days.  She's the author most known for writing The Yellow Wallpaper, but I'm writing about her short fiction, much of which is concerned to challenge the conventional idea that motherhood is natural and a practice that cannot be improved upon through the genius of modern social science.  In her fiction and non-fiction alike, she's quick to point out how contradictory it is that people champion motherhood as completely natural on the one hand, but worry incredibly about doing it wrong on the other.  If it were  natural, she reasons, there wouldn't be room to screw it up.  Therefore, we either have to stop worrying about child rearing or else be more methodical and rational about it. 

I feel bad for new moms, because motherhood is one of those subjects everyone thinks they're entitled to have an opinion about.  This sense of entitlement to an opinion ends up extending to the mom herself, who becomes a depersonalized case about which everyone feels free to conjecture.  What's especially violative about this is how the pregnant woman's body becomes a subject for discussion, and all the various details of gestation, lactation, dilation that have to do with private parts become public where babies are concerned.  Everyone has an opinion, and everyone seems entitled to supervise. 

I'd like to know more about why this is.  Maybe it's because motherhood is a place where highly charged personal and highly charged social issues meet.  To raise a child is to stake out allegiance to a number of different social positions, some intersecting and converging, others conflicting:  class, race, religion, region, ethnicity, region, nationality, family, ancestry, history.  At stake in motherhood is how and whether each of these is going to be reproduced, and it's understandable, if not fair to mothers, that people have opinions.  But people who have opinions about motherhood ought to be self-conscious about their personal stakes in their own opinions, which require scrunity and introspection of their often sub-conscious origins.  Motherhood turns an individual mom into a vector for everyone to have opinions about, and this isn't at all fair.  So everyone should shut the f--- up about motherhood.

What all this goes to show is how right Gilman was to distinguish motherhood from reproduction, or bare nature; after all, reproduction is "natural," but motherhood is a vexed issue around which "culture" and the social most actively swirl.  Motherhood is above all a cultural expression par excellence.

Tammi and I are fans of the crime show "Bones," and if you watched recently, you'll know in the last episode Angela gave birth, and Bones is pregnant by Booth.  If you saw the birth scene, you'll remember that during labor Angela was skyping into the lab through a computer placed at the foot of the hospital bed.  It's not clear that the lab could see her lady parts, but the implication was that there's nothing private about delivery, that, in fact, it's a moment when the normally concealed lady parts come into view (literally and metaphorically) for anyone concerned.  Can't find a clip on YouTube, but maybe I'll post one later. 

diet

Tammi and I were going to run a local 5k today, but at a $25 sign-up fee we decided against it.  For a local race in a local office park, with no bells and whistles and no technical T-shirt, it wasn't worth the price of half a week's groceries.  So I did a 20 miler instead, and for the first time in a while, felt great.  I credit the extra sleep this last week, the improved diet, and last Monday's trip to the gym. 

My body beat and my mind frayed from a bunch of conference-related activities, the weather cloudy and rainy and dark, I shifted my running to the evening last week and slept in.  I also ran less.  I needed the break.   Avoiding baked goods, sweets, and refined grains over the past four weeks has also improved my running, keeping my energy levels even, and leading me to replace those empty calories with whole grain bread, lots of potatoes (but pasta, because it's refined and becauase we're still pasta'ed out, is out), more fruit, and more protein.  Nutrition matters, I guess.  Finally, I went to the gym Monday for lifting and stretching, and after I got over the initial soreness, it made me more limber and made me feel like I had more control of my body when running. 

The diet control and supplementary work is a big step for me and frankly, I'm proud that I've been able to do it.  For so long, I didn't want to think about diet or any supplementary fitness; I just wanted to run and get it out of the way, and continue to believe that running was self-care enough, or that running allowed me to get away with ignoring other aspects of health.  Yes, you can run well on a crappy diet, but if you have a good diet you can run better.

felt blah today

Only went for a little run today, a little over a half hour--felt kind of blah.  It's cloudy and rainy here and I couldn't really muster the energy to do any more.   I went to the gym for some cross training yesterday and am sore in a whole bunch of new places.  My legs felt like they were disconnected from my body and nothing was working right.  I still have faith that cross training's going to benefit me in the end, but today feels like the day after beginning a new exercise program.  In the end this will make me a better athlete and a better runner, but in the meantime, I feel beat up.

Tammi got supplies today to start her new hobby, gardening.  With a garden plot in our apartment complext, and some seeds and fencing, she's ready to go.

imbalance

My left knee hurt on my run today, so did my left IT band, and my left hip.  My left hip/butt area is the weak spot in my body, where all my running injuries tend to originate.  The knee pain is caused by a tight IT band, which itself is caused by a lack of strength and flexibility in my left hip flexor.  I can feel on my runs lately that my gait is becoming a little lopsided and right-leg dominant. 

My aversion to stretching originates in a feeling that when the run ends, I should turn my attention to more important matters.  My aversion to cross training is that I'd rather run, because after all, I think, you get better at running by running.  Tammi warns that this attitude leads to injury and diminishing returns on training.  I cut my run short by 20 mins today to focus on stretching and strengthening, which I'll turn to after I blog.  My left-side weakness figuratively bit me in the ass when I first started back into serious running a little less than four years ago, with a nasty case of piriformis syndrome, and while I've been lucky to have more or less avoided being sidelined with injury since, if I don't attend to this my neglect of stretching will once again figuratively bite me in the ass.  There's a lesson in all of this anatomy, somewhere, about our character flaws.

refined grains

One day, someone's going to write a memior with the corny title, Refined Grains.  Grains is a word that goes in many different directions.  We say against the grain, talk about the grain of wood, or the grain in the field, whole grains, or we refer to film, a carrier of memory, as grainy.  There are many different senses of the word.  I have given up sugar and, to the extent possible, refined grains in order to stay trim for running but also to keep my energy levels even at a time when I'm not getting too much sleep, as now. 

We've been getting to bed early enough to get a solid seven hours, but I keep waking up around two, maybe as a result of lingering jetlag, but it was also a very busy week, one in which the conference I've been helping to plan was finally and successfully staged.  So, glad that's over with.  It went really well.  I gave a paper that was well received (and maybe the dread of giving a talk was part of what bolting me upright at 2am all last week, our subconsious works in strange ways) and the invited speaker seemed to enjoy herself.  

It's funny how European aristorcrats used to refine grain as a sign of their distance from the whole-grain eating plebes; how different things are now.  I ran twenty this morning and then with Tammi went to Whole Foods for a few items, including a recovery breakfast burrito.  One thing I'll say about Whole Foods:  They signify authenticity or wholeness to their customers by postering the place with images of third-world women sitting or standing next to bags of coffee beans or rice, but you never see images of third-world men.  Why is this?  Despite all the self-congratulatory progressivism of many of their customers, the third-world man still poses a sort of existential threat that interrupts the equaniminy of the shopping experience, insofar as he is associated more with terrorism (or with the sordid poverty of the new immigrant) than with feeling good about food.  Certainly, there is a hidden continuity between the war on terror and eating organic or buying expensive produce.  Both are, in a sense, protective measures that aim to keep contaminants out, or to keep the interior free from invasion from the exterior.