Sweating. Grunting. Huffing. I look down and realize I can’t feel my calves. There has to be a better way to kill boredom.

It starts with an overzealous attitude and too much free time. The pain gets worse. Blisters begin to form. You lance them and add more pressure. They turn into callouses. Run one mile then try for two. In high school I never did more than three. I can run for 45 minutes.

Seams on the shoes dig into your skin. The wear marks form deep groves that become permanent. On sunny days I have a deep tan line below the ankles. Remove the socks and my wet feet are ghostly pale and worn. They look like corpse feet.

After the first month it becomes easier. I pick landmarks to run to and record the time afterward. I don’t keep pace. I don’t track heart rates. I listen to music and download songs that I normally would shut off if they came on the radio. Shitty dance beats work well.

The weight begins to drop. Ten pounds, then 15. I eat terribly. Mostly grains and sugar. It doesn’t matter. By December I’ve lost 35 pounds. I mention this and a friend snaps at me. She says never to tell women you have trouble keeping weight on. I can run for an hour and a half without stopping.

My face has become more gaunt and my clothes hang off my frame. I make new notches in my belt to keep my jeans up. My girlfriend doesn’t rest her head on my shoulder anymore. She says it’s too bony. I put on a t-shirt and it feels at least a size too big.

You put Vaseline between your legs to keep them from bleeding. You coat your chest in liquid bandage to stop your nipples from scarring. People think it’s funny. I guess it would be to anyone who’s never had a lacerated torso. After morning runs I cannot do much else the rest of the day. My knees and back hurt. I pop aspirin and try not to think of physical labor. I can run for three hours without water.

I enter a race. I’m curious how all this training will hold up. Fifteen thousand bodies jam a few blocks. Crammed like plankton in a whale’s mouth. We stretch and shake. We shiver in the dawn chill. We jam energy bars into our mouths. I haven’t prepared. I got five hours of sleep and I drank the night before. I’d back out if I that were physically possible. The stockade only goes forward from here on.

They sound the gun and nothing happens. It takes minutes before you can even walk, much less jog. The sun rises and the dawn is beautiful for a second until it blinds you. I squint and almost trip over a young girl.

The course is kind enough to mark each mile. This makes everything worse. I don’t like constant reminders. The fans counter and yell encouraging things. They see my name and yell it out as I go by. There’s a lot of confidence in the faith of strangers. The numbers stop climbing. Every marker I see says 16. I feel like I’m running in circles.

The finale is brutal. People are screaming and your body wants to collapse. A man starts yelling at me to go faster and I can’t. My joints burn. I can feel the broken blisters flooding my socks. I slow down and limp the final mile. I nearly lose consciousness and block out the white noise. I haven’t had any water for miles. Any leftover energy is used to stay vertical.

Sprint the last few hundred yards so you look good finishing. It’s over. They give you a blanket and point you to the tents. Don’t stop. You rest and you feel worse. Got to keep moving. Stay upright. All I can think about is food. All I can think about is water.

I walk around in a daze. In my ears there is ringing and it’s wonderful. The water is the most precious I’ve ever tasted. The sun is gone and its warmth is replaced by searing wind. I don’t care. I raise my head and close my eyes. It blisters my face and I feel alive.

Just this past weekend, I went to New Orleans with seven of my co-workers to attend a conference. While we were “officially” there on business, it was one of the more entertaining trips I have taken in a long time. It’s funny how you can spend so much time with people on a regular basis, but still not really know them. Amidst the hustle and bustle of going to sessions on how to do our jobs as child care providers better, we found time to just hang out and have fun. We shared meals, we shared stories and we shared many laughs.

One such moment came on the third night that we were there. Several of us were just hanging out in one of the hotel rooms, when I had a random brilliant thought: Katie would look awesome in a Mohawk. She wears her hair short, and it looks great on her. It’s definitely a good fit, and it definitely would make a great Mohawk. All I had to do is say the word, and Katie jumped up, grabbed a massive glob of hair styling gel, and moments later was sporting one of the more killer Mohawks I have ever seen. It was a riot; we couldn’t stop laughing. It was one of those jokes that just kept on going throughout the night. Partly because you couldn’t help but laugh when you looked at her rocking the Mohawk, but also because Katie was so into it. It even kept going into the next day, because she said that there was so much gel in her hair that it made her scalp hurt.

The Mohawk was only the tip of the iceberg, but when all was said and done, I had a new and much better perspective on my relationship with these co-workers. I enjoy learning about different people and understanding what’s important to them and what they find funny. So thanks to Christine, Nicole, Katie, Jennifer, Dan, David and Stef. We managed to take a work trip and turn it into a fun trip, and I have a feeling that the fun is going to keep on coming, even now that we are back at the office.

I had one of those moments today when instead of making life easy, technology annihilated any sanity I had left in the middle of a crazy work day.

It started out simply enough. I called subcontractors to ask if they were bidding on a project we were working on. I would write down their answer…yes or no…and move on. Usually there’s 30-40 calls. Every time, I have to say the same thing:

“Hi, I’m calling from Verkler, Inc. Are you bidding on fillintheblank school tomorrow?” Write my answer. Next phone call.

My biggest obstacle is autoanswer phones. Many companies are using these now and they truly are a pain. Recently they reminded how sometimes technology that seems to streamline a process can, in reality, be obnoxious and even pointless.

This happened today and I wanted to bash my phone through my computer screen. I was calling a steel company, which will remain nameless, and was trying to get a hold of Matt. When I dialed the company’s number, an auto-answering service picked up. I sighed, but patiently waited for my options. Usually I have to listen to all the contact information, where the business is located, its office hours, and what services/products it provides. It begins like this:

“Hi. You have reached fillintheblank company. Our office hours are Monday through Friday 8-5…” And I continue to listen as they drone on and on about everything except what I need to know. I finally reach the employee directory. I waited for Matt’s name.

When I finally reached his extension, I found yet another automatic answering service: “Matt’s personal assistant.”

“Hi. You have reached Matt’s personal assistant. He may be on the other line or out of the office. If you would rather leave a message while he is being reached, please press one.”

This was the last straw for me. I had called to talk to Matt, not a machine. Frustrated, I left a hasty message and moved on down my list, but not before thinking about how much I hate technology sometimes. And, while I was steaming over my struggle at hand, I mentally listed other technologies I couldn’t stand:

• Keyboards on cell phones: Yeah, they’re cool. But honestly, it takes two hands to text on a keyboard. How can this be more convenient? It only takes ONE to use T9.
• Microsoft Word autoformatting: Call me an idiot but this ruins my documents more often than it makes them tidier. If I have to press enter/backspace one more time to get my margin where I want it, or constantly rework an outline because the numbers jump out of order, I might go postal.
• Twitter: I can’t bash all online social networking. I have dedicated much of my adult life to Facebook, carefully sculpting my profile to broadcast the best possible reflection of myself, but I don’t get Twitter. Sometimes I update my status on Facebook but letting people follow me every minute of the day and knowing what I am doing kind of creeps me out.

My entire day is spent using technology, so it’s ironic it can make life so easy and so frustrating at the same time. So as I sip my coffee from my coffeemaker, use my cell phone dozens of times a day, and use a computer most hours of the day, I will still hold to the opinion that too much of a good thing can be downright too much.

I have excessively strong feelings of attachment towards a griddle. Not any griddle, though I love a good pancake or grilled cheese sandwich. It’s an old-fashioned, square, slightly warped griddle that spends most of its time buried beneath a stack of pots and pans underneath our oven. It’s not even a very good griddle. It usually burns half a pancake and leaves the other half doughy.

But one of my very first memories of Denver involves this griddle. I had flown in the night before to interview for the job I now hold. My schedule for the day listed “Breakfast at Romero House” as the first event, and the then-coordinator, Zach, picked me up at my hotel and brought me to a sweet-looking, simple square house with frayed prayer flags over the front door. I was jet-lagged, nervous, a little oxygen-deprived, and I hovered awkwardly in the kitchen while Zach made pancakes on the stove using the square griddle. I had never seen a griddle like it before, and kind of loved its awkward homey-ness. And I thought, God, I hope I’m lucky enough to be cooking in this kitchen someday. Spotless, stainless steel appliance-heavy kitchens freak me out a little bit. I want a kitchen that’s cozy, cluttered, mismatched, worn. I’m weird like that.

And now I DO cook in that kitchen, all the time, and have shared it with fifteen different people through delicious meals and ridiculous mishaps. Once I came home to discover that some of the students in the house had made a glass dish explode by setting it on the stove. Another time, I confused cumin and cinnamon while making a lentil soup. (“Why does it smell like pastries in here?” my roommate asked.) The griddle usually stays untouched – we have some frying pans that work much better — but I feel a little welling of affection, a taste of a memory, when we pull it out for use.

Yesterday we spent the evening at the house making pupusas — a Salvadoran food that’s essentially a corn tortilla stuffed with beans and cheese. Two of my students and I sat at the kitchen table forming balls of dough, comfortably silent, accompanied by the slapslapslapslap of hand against dough as we flattened the tortillas. We were preparing for a dinner and presentation the following day about a trip we took to El Salvador in January, and wanted to get authentic with our food. Never mind the fact that our hosts in-country could create stacks of identically sized, thin, round pupusas and ours looked like a bad seventh grade home-ec project.

Today, I slipped on an apron, grabbed a spatula, and dug out the griddle. (We needed all hands on deck to cook a lot of pupusas fast.) For the next hour and a half, I commandeered the stove as my housemates made pupusa after pupusa, trying not to scald myself with hot oil. I thought about the hospitality I had been shown that first nervous day in Denver, and the hospitality we have tried to show since then, through pupusas, cinnamon lentil soup, pancakes, and lots of variations on rice and beans. We’re all a little mismatched here, definitely a little warped, but we have as much affection for one another as I have for that ridiculous griddle.

You say it’s not that big a deal. I say it’s amazing.

You say your scores weren’t that high, and you could have done better. I say you just graduated high school. Scores are scores, and a diploma is still a diploma.

You say you’re lucky to have kids like us. You say you’re glad we just went to college without thinking about it. I say you have no idea how much of an impact you had on us. I say I am here — in this place, with this life — because of you and Mom and only because of you and Mom.

You say the market is hard and jobs are scarce. You say you want more for your life. I say you went back to school. I say you have dreams and I hope you’ll chase them. I say you’ve done so much more than other people would have. I say don’t give up because you’re making your way. You will get there.

You say culinary school might be next. I say you can do anything you imagine. You always said that to me, didn’t you?

You say it’s hard. I say who do you think taught me to be so strong?

You say you love me and you’re proud.

I say me too, Daddy.