Crickets

I dreamed about running last night. I can’t remember details, just running, each time I woke in between hitting the snooze button this morning I was running and thinking of distances. That’s one nice side effect of sleep deprivation you know, remembering your dreams. I’ve been getting too much sleep lately and not remembering them because I’m not waking in the middle. Last night I stayed up very very late doing some long overdue blog surfing. I also finally got around to adding a blogroll to my sidebar. It is a work in progress, I’m looking to add more running oriented blogs, especially from Atlantans so I can steal their training ideas. Not all of them are health and fitness oriented, some are actually people I know in real life.

Then when I was finally getting ready to go to bed I remembered the crickets. They came two days early because of the holiday and I wasn’t ready for them. But I couldn’t bear the thought of going to bed and leaving them for another night and day in their cold and soulless shipping tube. So I retrieved the cricket keeper, temporarily housed the remaining crickets from the last batch in a plastic bucket, and cleaned cricket poop and sheds and left over food so it was all sparkling and shiny and welcoming. Then I transferred the older crickets back in, gave them fresh food, and then dumped 50 new crickets on their heads. I don’t think they were impressed. But they all looked settled in this morning. Good cricket husbandry is one of those things that I spend way too much time fretting about but had I gone on to bed last night I would have woken this morning feeling all guilty like only a bad cricket mommy can. Which is ultimately ridiculous because I simultaneously have NO compunction about dumping 20 crickets into the terrarium of death and cheering as Bindi the Beard Dragon systematically, prehistorically and awesomely hunts them down. Sometimes Chase and I even make voices for the crickets and carry on silly conversations wherein they are super excited about the spacious new digs, then confused when their friends start disappearing one by one, then . . . CRUNCH. I guess I just figure I owe them clean and well fed final days. And, in the scheme of things, it’s pretty easy to make crickets happy. Its satisfying to serve the crickets in my life. It makes me happy.

I’ve devoted so much time to controlling and complicating things in order to “create” happiness. And I think there IS something admirable in that, but there is also something somewhat pathetic in it. Because my manufactured happy moments are never as satisfying as the ones that catch me unawares. I used to spend a lot of time researching work out techniques and buying workout equipment and clothing. I would read motivational books and get really really really psyched to MAKE THE CONNECTION. And I’d be really focused on how I looked working out, and how it felt to tell people I was working out, and not so much on what was going on within me. And the gear would lose its novelty. And all I would really perceive was pain and effort and the lack of instant results. And the gear would start gathering dust. And I would feel a bit stronger in my conviction that I just couldn’t do it.

What was different this time? I don’t know. I just didn’t think too much, which is a real fundamental accomplishment for me. I just showed up that first morning after only 2 hours of sleep with my stomach in knots. Then, after fighting the urge to hurl and after a thoroughly horrible day on every other front in my life, I just got up and went again the next morning, without really thinking about it too much. I did start blogging that second day, but the blogging has been less about controlling the process and more about merely documenting it. Certainly this blog is full of those unexpected moments of happiness that I’m only now fully realizing would never have happened had I tried to force them. Maybe I’ve just finally reached a point where I’ve stopped expecting happiness as my due. And now I’m finally free to fully appreciate those moments when I stumble across them.