(Sunday Paper, Year VIII, Issue 5)

2023 is an odd year, right?

I mean it’s odd in the even-odd sense, but it seems like a weird number year, doesn’t it?

Maybe it’s the shape of the 3, and that’s why it feels different than 2021…but I kind of had the same sense about 2013.

And I was thinking about 2013 this week, and what I was doing 10 years ago.

First of all, January is a reflective time by itself.

There is still a big teacher part of me that views September as a starting point for so many things, and since so much of our lives revolves around the girls’ school year, it still actually is a starting point for so much of what we do.

But January has the advantage of the calendar page turn.

And, for me and Kathy, it also has significance since our first date was on January 25, 2000. So that has nice symmetry because it was the beginning of the year and also it’s easy to do the math on how long we’ve been together. (23 years. I know not everyone can be a math whiz.)

So that’s crazy by itself, 23 years.

But ten years ago, in January 2013, a real change was bubbling up. In 18 months I would be done teaching. (Well, elementary school teaching, I guess I have to say now that I’m back teaching much older students.)

And I was just starting one of my little projects.

On January 1, 2013, I kicked off ‘365 New Things In 2013’, where I tried to do something new and I wrote about it and I filled up the entire calendar.

Some of them, I admit, were a bit of a stretch, but I watched new movies, I listened to music I hadn’t before - every Monday was Music Monday - which, obviously, I still like to do every so often and revisited in 2022.

But, even with 365 New Things under my belt, there were other things I still wanted to do and didn’t.

And that was what I was reflecting on this week.

The biggest thing I felt as a missed opportunity in 2013 was performing stand-up comedy. I finally did that on July 14, 2014, and continued until the pandemic. I haven’t written off getting back to it - I’m still writing comedy, just haven’t figured out when I’ll be comfortable performing again.

I had a very supportive friend who I spoke about doing storytelling at a Moth show with. I still haven’t done that.

And, of course, that seemingly impossible one, which I’ve now had the opportunity to do twice: Run the Boston Marathon.

I went through such a life-changing event in 2014 when I left teaching. (I know it sounds fishy for me to stress this but it was of my choosing. I don’t know if I have to make that clear or not.) I loved a bunch of people I worked with - my co-teacher chief among them, if she is reading this - I had amazing relationships with both co-teachers I worked with over the years and I should stress that too - but there were other factors and people that were draining my happiness.

I mention that not to dig deep into past issues. But to point out the thing I miss most about that time of my life is the relationships I had with colleagues and good friends that I don’t have working mostly solitarily these days.

BUT the point is I’ve been so lucky.

If you had told me ten years ago - even at the end of 2013 - that I would get a chance to perform comedy (and do it pretty well, I think), that I would get to run multiple marathons - including two in Boston! - all while being a more attentive parent than I was ever able to be when I was teaching…well, I certainly wouldn’t have expected to hear it.

So 2023. Certainly an odd year.

But maybe that 3 is just shaped that way because it’s holding back a bunch of good things to come.

What I’ve Been Enjoying

I’ve been watching ‘Seinfeld’ from the beginning in my free time. It had been a long time since I’d watched any of it…and certainly not the entire thing. When these early episodes get going they get really good really fast. It’s amazing. And, man, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is great from the get-go. I’m appreciating the show differently watching it now. So good.

Notes

*A reminder, on this Conference Championship Sunday, that I have Super Bowl squares available. The board is half full…it’ll probably fill up quick once the matchup is set tonight. (I hope?) If you’re interested, let me know. 1 square for $30, 2 for $55, 4 for $100…half the pot to prizes, half goes to Ronald McDonald Charities, for which I’ll be running the Chicago Marathon in the fall. Thanks for considering!

*That picture above is NOT from 10 years ago, even though that’s the title of this post. It is from yesterday. As I ran through Kenmore Square I thought it would be fun to do a selfie version of that Boston Marathon picture I love so much. Not bad.

*Oh, speaking of yesterday’s run, I did have a good run, thank you for asking. I ran 18 miles. Those super-long ones have been tough in previous training cycles. I tended not to pace myself too well…and if we started in Hopkinton that downhill followed by the hills in miles 18-21 (and the one at 16) would be pretty intimidating to me. But on Saturday I started in Natick and ran to the finish line in Boston, and the hills, instead of 18-21, were at miles 9.5-12.5…and there was no huge downhill to start. It was notable to me that it was the strongest I’ve ever felt making my way down Beacon Street, which I’m taking as a positive sign with the Wilmington Marathon now less than a month away.

*Next week will be tricky. I’m supposed to run 21 miles, but it’s looking like it’ll be the coldest temperatures of the training cycle here. On top of that - Saturday Kathy was able to drop me in Natick and then pick me up in Boston three and a half hours later. This week she’s going on a business trip and won’t be back in time for my long run…so I need to do some figuring. I might mix some outdoor and treadmill…I don’t know. Or maybe do a bunch of runs during the week, log a suitable amount of miles, and take it into taper mode. Hard to say. But I would like to feel as good about my running next week as I do right now.

*You can, of course, still find ‘365 New Things In 2013’ at the link at the top of the page. I tried to categorize them at one point - I might have that somewhere, with links to the different segments of 10-15 each…but you can always just read them backwards.

*I did some videos during my run on Instagram Stories on the running account. It was pretty fun and helped me pass the time. They’re probably gone now but you can follow along with future posts there - I like experimenting with the different parts of Instagram on that account. The links for all the social media are below. Thanks for following along!