Reading & Fitness (or lack thereof)

I have been trying to read a little more. For a long, long time I was reading 2-3 books a week, and it was really rewarding. I tend to read a lot of books that are recommended by friends and family, and so I end up learning about things that I probably wouldn't have chosen as topics.

It has been nice to actually take the time to read again. It's even nicer because I just got a whole bunch of books. To be fair, some of them are books of essays and short stories, which makes them pretty easy to polish off in the course of a week. Someone got me a couple of books that have the stories behind famous titles (Catch-22, Sonnets from the Portuguese, etc.), and that made for interesting reading as I pass out at night.

Now if I could just find some reading that encouraged me to exercise and eat right, I'd be in fine fettle. All of these intellectual pursuits are doing nothing for my sprawling waistline. I even walked a 5k last week and I barely noticed--I was so busy that I can barely remember which day it was--oh, and I gained two pounds the day after the race.

But the weight gain wasn't the worst part of the 5k. No, the worst part about the 5k was trying to find my car afterwards. I swear to you, I probably walked at least as far in the giant parking lot looking for my car as I had during the actual 5k race. I was at the end of my tether by the time I swallowed my pride and asked a group of cops if they could help me find my car--and thank goodness I did, because I was totally in the wrong place. Hey, I'm relatively new to Long Island, okay? Not that that's any excuse, because Long Island is really a pretty small place. How small you ask? So small that the cop who helped me turned out to be my former colleague's husband. No, seriously. Because the embarrassment of having to have a cop help me find my car was not enough--the cop actually had to have the ability to tell a bunch of people who know me how stupid I was.

Small world.