The Raven's Roost

Today I'm having some bother with my heart arrhythmia. It's almost entirely likely to be fallout from the stress and anxiety of the past week, but I decided to be on the safer side and skip today's run. Sunday's long run was the last bit of "marathon recovery," and aside from the strength and flexibility work I need to do for the Spartan, the run itself is a 5k, so there's no serious need for lots of high training mileage. I figure that even if I take several days off it won't hurt me.

Instead I've roasted a pan of veggies with black beans for making burritos and I'm painting my nails. I received a bottle of OPI's "Dance party teal dawn" as a gift and I like the color, but a lot of people on Amazon are complaining about it. It's thin, needs a lot of coats to build up the color, and has a dull, chalky finish. In my experience, any color billed as "neon" is thin and either needs lots of lightly-applied coats, or a white base coat to show up properly. Also, if you want a glossy finish, you need to use a glossy top coat. Seriously. I mean if you're into matte you can leave it as is, but I'm curious about these people who seem to not need a top coat.

Last night I finished up Born to Be Posthumous, which I think I mentioned was a biography of Edward Gorey. On the whole, it was a good read and I still highly recommend it. However, I'm a little bothered by Mark Dery's insistence of Gorey being gay. On the whole he's a pretty fair handed writer, but Gorey himself said in interviews that he wasn't terribly interested in sex and that he "thankfully" was "reasonably undersexed or something." And yes, I admit that it would be pretty cool to count him among the cake-eaters, but I'd like to think I'm not imposing my own agenda while simultaneously accused Dery of imposing his. But. People are allowed to self-identify. They are. And while yes, he may have had a few sexual experiences and crushes that involved other men, I can't stress enough that behavior and attraction are not the same things. And also that people are allowed to self-identify. I think it just bothers me that Dery seems to be wishfully assigning a sexuality to Gorey the way kids on Tumblr assign favored sexual attractions to fictional characters. But Gorey wasn't a fictional character, he was a real guy and the fact that he's dead doesn't mean you get to try to define an aspect of life that he was obviously very reticent about - and with good reason when you consider his teenage and young adult years in the 40s and 50s.

Gorey also has one of the more amusing observations about sex and pornography, at least as far as I'm concerned, which is that there are only so many things you can put into so many other things. But then this was also the man who wrote The Curious Sofa, with the wonderful line, "Still later, Gerald did a terrible thing to Elsie with a saucepan."

I received a pair of Mechanix gloves which I'll be wearing for Spartan and likely for a lot of other things as well. They are from the M-PACT line, so the backs are impact rated, the palms are nice and grippy, and the particular ones I picked are fingerless. Well, after the second knuckle, they're fingerless. So you still have your dexterity and feeling while your hands are protected. Fox and I also looked at the garage I-beams for places to secure a climbing rope so I can practice with that. I mean, I could use one of the trees, but these pines drop their lower branches as they grow, so I would be wary of any branch I could actually reach. And anyway, I'd like to have a rope and a chin-up bar and such for general fitness purposes.