The weather's been so intensely beautiful, like beauty concentrated, that I have gone running each of the past three days. Today I ran to the top of the hill that stymied me halfway the day before. Then I ran to the running track to see if the snow and ice was all gone, and it was, so I did 5×100 where I ran the flats and walked the curves. (OK, the third one was more like a 60, but I put my heart into it.)

DIdn't get my 10-minute warning this afternoon so I didn't get “My First Kiss” in the mail to The Pinch, but I have finished the editing and I'm proud of it. It reads like it was written by me, but different. Quite exciting. Re-reading Ulysses was a good way to follow re-reading Infinite Jest, though it hasn't done much for my thread-holding, if you've noticed. In any case, my reading diet is informing my writing output. Fuel for the flames. Not that I'm advocating bookburning.

I also submitted three one-act plays for a festival. Yeah! This fact is however diminished by the following outstanding, out-of-the-park news:

Monstro handed his printed 350-page dissertation to his second and third readers' secretary and mailbox today. He also made an appointment to be measured for his regalia. I told him I'd measure his regalia for free but he didn't take me up on it. Another time, perhaps. He also applied for four more professorships, including one in New Orleans, which would be a dream come true from Heaven. We went to the post office together on our way to pick up our kids. The postal worker put postage on his big envelope but I held up her progress by peeling the cat hair out from underneath the return-address label.

“Watch out,” Monstro warned me. “She's already accepted it… you could get in trouble.”

“Then when we get home, you can punish me,” I said. The postlady laughed.

“It's our anniversary this weekend,” I said.

Anyway, I'm looking at my title and realize I haven't paid it off yet. I was running this afternoon and saw a woman stopped at the fence looking at some working farm equipment. It was a manure-laden conveyer belt pointing up 65 degrees. Then the manure fell into an already substatntial pile of manure on the ground.

We watched it in silence for a minute and then I said, “There's a life lesson for you, right? Some days are like that.”

She laughed. “Don't I know it.”

“The thing is, though, everything grows stronger and taller as a result,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes it does.”

I wanted to get back to my run (I hadn't tried conquering the hill yet) so I excused myself with a “God bless you” and took off running.

Then, when I was doing my track workout, everything I saw was trees with branches like below-the-waist [first draft=waste] body hair, with gleaming spires sticking up from that. And all the houses seemed to have double-peaked ridgelines. “Welcome to Smith,” I thought. 'Course my inference might also have something to do with the fact that someone's sixth anniversary is this weekend, and we're so excited around the house we're just giggling. It's fun.

So yes, three runs in three days. The weather's been so beautiful that my past two runs have been one hour apiece. The one before that was on the new stretch of bikepath — just wonderful. And the day before that, I walked with the kids and pushed them in the double stroller all the way home.

But the real reason why I run is that yesterday I was passing my kid's preschool as I started my second big loop around campus, and one of the other mothers who's so shy we barely exchange words said to me, “You look beautiful and happy,” and that's how I felt.