Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to everyone!

I made it home to Michigan after a grueling ten hundred hour trip (17 hours...). The trip was longer because I decided to do that "Home to Michigan Burpee Challenge!" where I'd do a burpee for every mile I traveled home. So, every 100 miles or so, I' d stop and do burpees. Which was initially pretty fun, but got to be quite a bit of a drag later on, as well as having the unfortunate side effect of adding over an hour to my total travel time. Blarg.

But, I did it. And, in retrospect, I don't regret it, so it must not have been too bad.

Christmas itself was lovely. I got the sweatpants I wanted (Michigan!) some additional, unexpected and undeserved gifts, and got to enjoy seeing my Dad open a new iPad all us kids pooled in to get him. It was super fun. :)

Then, I ate some delicious cheesecake my sister made and plated up (Paleo be damned)!

Seriously. Amazing.

(Sidenote: I'm blogging from my iPad, so the formatting is a little off. Sorry.)

Then, today, I went out and not only ate sushi, but got a new tattoo from the awesome Gareth Hawkins.  The photo below is of the outline, partially finished, from my angle. Golly, it ached, but nothing compared to the brutality that was the reworking of the sternum tattoo. Ooch. I'll never forget that.

All in all, a lovely few days. I'm hoping to get to Crossfit 616 in the next day or two, but we'll see how the ol' ribs stand up! I went for a sweet run this morning with a new Zombies, Run! app on my phone, which made it more exciting than it would have otherwise been.

Mary Roach's Ted Talk

Oh, and really quickly, because I had this as a draft, but didn't publish it... here is an interesting (and super funny) TED talk by Mary Roach, author of "Bonk" (and "Stiff" and a number of other lovely books). I've read almost all of Mary's books and love them. Reading her, she seems amazingly personable and funny, and I think this also comes through in a really delightful way in this talk too. 

NSFW without headphones, but should be otherwise.

Mitten bound

So excited, non-existent bloggy friends!I'm headed back to the Great (not so very) White North in a few hours!

This time, to keep it interesting, I've opted to try and do a burpee for each mile traveled. So hyped. Depending on the route, that means by tomorrow sometime I'll have completed between 840 and 890 burpees. I'm going to try and make a little compilation video, but we'll see how the ol' iPhone works with me.

Like Robert Frost, I've "...miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep."
:)

Happy and safe travels to all who are traveling this weekend, especially if you're headed into snow.

"Because it's there..." and "because it's addictive."

Ben Saunder's lovely TED talk about getting out and living life. I can't claim I found this on my own; the lovely Crossfit616 in Grand Rapids has a blog (which I follow) and they mentioned it (and cited where they found it).

Ben is right -- it can be addictive. But the mindset has to be there to want to push the envelope and not settle. So, push, people. Push. 

Side note: if you're in Grand Rapids, Michigan and are XFit inclined, check out Crossfit 616. Seriously awesome people who are amazingly welcoming and cheerful about wanting to get in a good hard workout. I did "Murph" for the first time with them over Thanksgiving break. About killed me. I loved it.

A lovely list of advice...

As usual, this is from my favorite list-making site, Thought Catalog.
25 ways to make your life better immediately. 
I like the majority of them, but #25 is especially true: Love Hard. Go out and try to love as hard as you can.

But to this, I also want to add -- allow yourself to be loved hard. I feel like loving hard can be a little freaky to the people around you, especially when you aren't used to it. I know that it is much easier for me to actively love hard than to accept being loved hard.  It's scary. And it's hard to overcome the "I don't deserve this/to be happy" slump that is easy to fall into.

I think it can be very difficult to be loved hard without thinking that there are a slew of other social obligations that are associated with it. This is definitely true for me because it is hard for me to separate friends from lovers. This may be because I didn't attend public school early on and didn't interact much with a non-related, same-age cohort until sophomore year of highschool, where the waters were already heavily muddied with hormones. So I tend to rely a lot on the internet (totally unmuddled, right?) to try and help me figure out social context... which can be confusing, because some stuff out there doesn't even make intuitive sense.

Plus, I think there is a complicated social dance around friendship and love and the idea that somehow something that doesn't turn into a romantic love isn't as "worthy." This idea that  romantic love trumps platonic love in terms of intensity is simply myopic.  


But do it! Let yourself be loved hard by everyone in your life. And love the people in your life so, so hard.

Here are some hyena pictures to portray this. Side note: I friggin' love spotted hyenas. Their social order is incredibly complex, which makes their evolutionary history really alluring. Plus, they are total badasses and uniquely gorgeous. If anything can say "hard love/love hard" it's hyenas.

(source)

 Hanging with a lion -- still cool. (source)

Ben Folds for Wednesday

Updated to add this, because that seems a little too melancholic for Wednesday... and I hope I will feel this excited about going to the mall to finish up my Christmas shopping today or tomorrow:
(<3 you, HIMYM!)

traumatic insemination

A cool PLOS ONE article about the scents associated with bedbug sex. Gotta love it, because bedbugs have this traumatic insemination technique which is sort of alarming, sort of kink-ish, and pretty cool when you take a moment to wonder about the evolution of such a behavior.