Yum & Yuk

Video: serious awesomeness.

Important discussion from Oxfam America: When is a “looter” really just a survivor? "Consider the options for desperate people trying to survive, and look for a realistic perspective on news coverage in the early days after a disaster."

Last year I totally failed at a running streak, but I'm going to give it another shot this holiday season: The 2013 Holiday Running Streak ("pledging to run at least one mile every day, Thanksgiving through New Year's"). We completed our "three half-marathons in three months" goals, and now don't have another long race till our half in February. In the mean time, I want to keep up my stamina with regular running and a few short races, but mainly focus on yoga. I'm still going to Baptiste (3-5 times per week) and loving its affect on my mental health. It's very difficult and humbling to get so face to face with my aches and pains and lack of flexibility, and it's not a calorie burner in the way that running is (ugh, so hard to free the mind from the calorie counting trap), but it's been invaluable for my mental and emotional health and I feel very lucky to have gotten back into the practice.

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern." - Annie Dillard

This is beautiful: Self-Made Man #24: Love Your Emergency: "I wish I’d told the woman in Brooklyn that we can only hold the muscle of what we most love about ourselves alongside the little terrors that haunt us, but nothing is ever erased. We’re just bodies stamped with time, moving through space, coming together, coming undone. Those red-and-white emergencies sparkle with their own terrible beauty, but you have to stay up late, you have to ignore the call of the elevator operator, you have to wait long enough and love it all hard enough to really, really see."

"Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days." ― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship