The Last Day of My 20s

It’s 8 pm, the sky is black, and I just finished a Skype call with my family, whose laughing faces were illuminated by lazy Sunday brunch sunshine. I’m an ocean away, in the bedroom of our little apartment. Two doors away, in the living room, I hear the rustling of gift wrap. I am banned from that room for the night: Jeff is preparing a birthday surprise.  Tomorrow, as previously feared, I will be 30. From the vault of my ridiculous and unfounded worries: I will wake up covered in menopause, with a sudden penchant for raisin scones and trousers that button up just at tit level. Tomorrow is the first day of a new decade, and for the first time in my life, I feel like age means something. I mean, I’m not even sure what’ll happen when the gods above see my un-finished 30 before 30 list, but now I’ve also gotta explain (to someone?) why I don’t want kids or a mortgage (…yet.) 

I'm lucky that my friends are all relatively the same age, and we're all making this leap into this new decade, one by one, like popcorn kernels. Meanwhile, in Ireland, because moving to another country wasn't enough change, I decided to round up my favourite memories from this decade, to hopefully stop my ears from ringing with the fear that I'm going to be Ye Aulde with nothing to show for it. 

8 Before 30

I love lists. To-do lists, to-buy lists, to-read lists, you name it, I’ve made a list for it.  In my desk, there is currently a growing list of food I want to eat in the near future, because I can’t think clearly when I’m thrashing violently Emily Rose style, seized by the satanic hands of Father Hunger. In my purse is a list of songs to sing in my head when I’m on the train, and a list of dead animals I’ve seen by the side of the road leading up to that train. Just kidding, if I had a list like that, it would only have one item: a rat.  Can I just mention that nobody seems to mind this recurring appearance? I’m the only one clutching my chest, gasping for breath when I find myself nearly stepping on its body, mouthing “Oh my God” to let everyone know I am a compassionate human being, outraged by dead rats, and clearly much more sensitive/distinguished than those who simply walk past it. No one cares, and, in the afternoon, on my walk back, the rat is gone. It’s probably the same rat every time. Desperate for attention, he plays dead a couple of times a week, and when the morning rush carelessly walks by (well because they already know this trick and have had enough, cheers) he slowly sits up, fixes his hair, dusts off his knees, and walks back into the bushes. Number of people gasping Oh My God today: One, his list says, Will return tomorrow.

Dublin and Me

Hello, do you have brewed coffee? Brewed. Brewed. It’s like…when you run beans through a filter. Nope, not like an Americano. Okay, that’s fine. I’ll have an Americano.

It’s Alisa.

Alisa. A….L…..I……S……A.

Haha, no, I can’t help push Trump out of the elections. I’m Canadian. Actually, I’m from Ottawa. It’s….like…do you know Toronto? It’s kinda beside that. Yeah. I like Drake too.

I’ve been living in Dublin almost 6 months now, and I’m just now admitting that there is no way to concisely organize my thoughts into one short and coherent blog post about my experiences, so I might as well just bite the bullet and talk about the part that’s been sort of the parchment paper lining the uhh muffins of my Irish…adventure. I’ll try to fix this analogy later.

Three Fourty-Four: A Marathon

There's nothing like it. Not love, not money, not good news, not great memories. Nothing comes close to the feeling you get when your effort pays off. You can't explain it, and in a way it's inherently selfish: you look at yourself and share your pride with yourself, and yourself only.
I was raised to believe modesty is the only way to be an upstanding member of a (freshly post communist) society. Russians do not encourage. Pride goes hand in hand with guilt, and I grew up with my parents enthusiastically pointing out everything that could ever be wrong with me. Luckily I got you back, mom, through the art of the written word! Who's laughing now?

I ran my first marathon in October. It's been three months and I've only now gotten the nerve to write about it with the pride it deserves. But today I thought enough is enough, it needs to be said: I fucking killed it. If it had come easily, if it had been something that happened by chance, I wouldn't bother writing about it because nobody likes a bragger. It did not happen by accident. I gave up my summer, my weekends, my sleep, some friends, and any sense of physical comfort. I broke a few toes, lost a few nails, and came embarrassingly close to fainting on a number of occasions. I wanted to stop, to skip runs, I wanted to give up more than I would ever admit. I didn't feel the running paying off, I just felt weaker as every week went by. And then, Toronto came. And then it was time to just do it, and I felt the same way I did three years ago, when I first thought about running. I was so nervous I put my mom and sister in a separate hotel room from mine. Anais suggested I get race gear because no matter what happens, I'll always want to remember my first marathon, so I got this one.

I couldn't find the 4:30 pacer so I decided to start with the 3:30 and let myself fall behind.  I didn't feel the first 15 kilometres. They just flew by, song after song, mile after mile, with no breaks or walking.  It was only at the halfway point that I realized my legs had started to shake. 15k later I knew I was in a new place. I had never run longer than 26km and I didn't know how my body would react to this new distance. This is what makes me nervous: the uncharted part. Still, I didn't stop, aside from slowing down to have a power gel. "I figure once we hit 35k, we're in the clear!" a Rastafarian man wearing head-to-toe neon green walked up behind me, eating a gel of his own. Perfect, I'm hallucinating, I thought. I mumbled something incomprehensible akin to "good luck" or something, and we both laughed and began running again.

I could no longer feel my feet in the last 5k. The pain had become too much to process, so I counted on what I memorized as a running stance, no longer sure of how fast I was going. I remember the 41km mark. The numbers ceased being numbers and it stopped being a countdown, but was something my body had decided was a continuous treadmill of pavement. And then..the finish line.  All I hoped was to not fall before hitting it. I remembered my silly goal of 3:55 that I talked about in the blog post I wrote while training.  It couldn't be that fast- I had fallen behind when my knees started to kill - but I knew I would be happy with whatever I got, as long as I just didn't fall. Hundreds of people high-fived us as we ran the last kilometre. I was sure I would cry, but all I did was thank them again and again, gasping for those last few breaths that would get me there so I could finally stop.  Just finish. Don't fall.

3:44

Three motherfucking fourty-four. 

Did I cry when I saw this? No. It's been months and I've been waiting to have that moment where I realize how overwhelming it was to see myself beating any goal I could've ever imagined. I thought I would be overcome with a mental slideshow of how far I've come, but I've felt nothing aside from an overwhelming shock. I'm still in shock, months later. 

230 / 1313 in my gender. 50/ 236 in the 25-29 category.  1:46 half-marathon time. *enter every Kanye song that has ever existed* Turns out the Hansons Marathon program really works. It kicks your ass, it's hard as hell, but it works. It helps you endure the pain, it helps you stay strong, stay light on your feet despite feeling every pound hit that pavement for the last few miles. It helps you push the pain aside, and isn't that what you have to do, not only in running but in life? Just keep going.

Running with hypothyroid can be tough.  My body wants to be slow, with my metabolism constantly playing tug of war against the supplements I take to counter it. It's a constant struggle to run faster, run lighter, to persevere despite the voice that tells me to just sit this one out. What screams louder than all that is effort. Effort is what got me here, bragging my ass off, and I stand behind it. Effort has no emotion. It doesn't care about your excuses. It just is or it isn't. You train, you see results. Effort will never let you down. I'm proud that I've felt it, I'm proud to have found the formula, and to have found that it's actually very simple: do it. In a sea of catchy sayings and quotes that are supposedly meant to inspire but don't hold weight in the real world, this is the absolute truth.

New Year, Old You!

Confession: reading "New Year, New Me!" quotes makes me want to repeatedly get into unmarked vans and hope for not the best. That's right, friends: I have emerged from my two month hiatus of "has she finally eaten herself to death?" just in time to remind you that three years ago, you probably promised yourself that January would be the month you finally commit to eating nothing but lemon-water and sad memories. After day three, you probably fainted and, as your limp body rolled down the escalator like a freshly defrosted turkey, you made a mental note to stop the madness.  Two years ago, you likely made a resolution to be more sociable, finally genuinely accepting that Facebook party invitation from that guy who sends out like eighty a week. You know, that guy - the one you can't remember adding on Facebook. The guy named DJ SteezeOnWheeze, where SteezeOnWheeze was somehow allowed as a last name, and every second word is capitalized, and you want to remove him from your friends list, but you're not sure how you know him and he might turn out to be someone important so you keep him on just in case. This is the guy who 'spins' 'tracks' at that really cool place between the Shawarma Emporium and a laundromat for the homeless, and two years ago, it was time to make a change in your life so you said yes to his next event. The new sociable you paid the $8 to get into that party, bopped your head to those hot-off-the-Serbian-press mashups of Adele and Cotton-eye Joe while dreaming about the $1.49 menu at McDonald's, and later went home unfriending Mr.Steez once and for all. What was wrong with staying home to marathon-watch the Kardashians, anyway?

And remember last year? You said you'd read more, didn't you? You said you'd finish Anna Karenina, but the long words made you want to take lots of naps. You switched to The Secret, but it felt like there were too many secrets as it was. You picked up Garfield Does Sunday, but the phone rang, and you ended up promising yourself that you'd set aside five minutes a day to catch up on that comic with the guy with the huge nose but like, comics are getting so philosophical these days and newspapers are outdated anyway.  Why, dear resolution-makers, would this year be any different? And why try to be a 'new' you anyway? What's wrong with the old you? Do you just not like the old you? What if that's all you needed to change? Look, I'm being a hypocrite here, because I make resolutions left, right and centre. But I stick to them. Why? Because I'm fucking perfect and motivated and disciplined, and also I'm lying because the only time I actually stuck to them was when I went on a raw diet for a month and the time I got so fat I literally had to go on a 30 diet of cheese and meat for people who have zero ambition. Every other year, I've made goals to be more tanned, less hairy, less of an idiot, more of a shopper, less poor, more fragrant, less pizza, more velvet coat hangers. I haven't changed, but I sure have spent a ton of weeks actively hating myself for not having stuck to those goals. Booooring.

My suggestion to you, as we plunge into what will certainly be another year of Oh My God, is to stay exactly as you are. And, if you want to eat a salad here and there, that's cool. If you catch a headline in a newspaper article that makes you wanna learn more about Bulgaria and suddenly you're worldly and kinda look like George Clooney's wife by consequence, great. But lets stop with the all-encompassing promises to radically change ourselves. We've put in so many years building who we are now - lets honour those people, as hairy as those people may be.

I hope you all ate so much Christmas food you considered barfing to make space for more. I hope someone's cat broke their glass ornament, and someone said "If I have to watch Elf one more time, I swear..." and that at least one person sang the Mariah Carey song that is basically the one definitive song of the holidays.

I hope you remembered to love yourselves despite the meat sweats, and that you continue to love yourselves into 2016, because really, New Year, Old You. And that person is awesome.

Also yesterday I fell out of a bus.