Despite the lack of entries lately, I haven’t fallen off the running wagon again. Though - if you want to be all technical – I am not actually running, but I’m training. I’m stretching and icing and strengthening and for a while I was even pumping myself up with ibuprofen, and for the past few days I’ve been spending time on the elliptical machines. Not quality time so much as half hour long monotonous segments, but that’s all they let you do at the UO gym.

Meanwhile the rest of my life has been steadily descending into chaos. Not the kind of happy chaos in which I most often cheerfully reside, but a newer, more frantic, more strung out chaos that I’m hoping will end in approximately – oh, let’s just pick a time frame – two months.

This new chaos derives mostly from the fact that, in addition to training for a marathon, I am currently finishing my master’s thesis and starting an internship. Those of you who talk to me often are by now confused, no doubt, about why this “finishing” of the thesis has been going on for nearly as long as the beginning and middle of the process. It’s mostly because after I thought the writing was done I started with the layout, and then the layout expanded and grew and clamored for more images, and then the images multiplied and divided and thirsted for more text and layout. So now I have a hundred and fifty page full color monster that still has no conclusion and is going to cost as much to print as six months in southeast Asia. Not that I’m sitting here weighing the pros and cons of that option or anything.

The goal was to turn in the final draft on Thursday, but I blew that off when two friends from D.C. cruised into town on their way to Portland, so now the goal is Monday. I’m really, really going for Monday.

In the midst of the thesis finishing, everything else has gone to shit. Weeks-old phone and email messages languish unanswered, boxes from last week’s garage sale gather dust in my truck bed. I have no fresh food in the house. I have nothing to wear to the wedding I’m going to next weekend. With seven weeks to the marathon, I have no airplane ticket to Alaska and I’m about $2500 short of my fundraising goal. I have become a flaky disaster.

So just for the record: Kira, Andrew, & Aerin, congratulations on the walkathon! Jen, congratulations on the race! Joshua, I’m sorry I keep not showing up. Matt, you will eventually get a birthday present, and it will be cool. Lisa, I will call you back. Julie, I’m sorry I didn’t get to read your essay. Emilee, I hope your hip is holding up (we can limp to the finishline together). And everyone else who drops in here, I’ll try to be less scarce. For the moment I’m going to go hang out with my old friend Sleep, who it turns out is a terrific antidote for my new friend Forgot to Eat Dinner.