Last night I had a dream that I cut off my hair again to a sleek little bob, just like I did in November of 2009. I thought, this is fun but I wish I'd kept the long hair for a few more months. It's rare that I wake up from a dream satisfied that at least something is going my way. But I'll probably cut off all of my hair in a few months.

Already this morning I wrote a pretty solid draft of a new piece and applied for a job. Next up: walk to the co-op to buy more coffee, then submit some poems.

Saturday, I like you so far.

Today in things that made me cry: this video. I volunteer for Steel City Greyhounds, and it's a great organization that helps dogs who need homes. In fact, I'm about to go walk a couple of them right now.

This article from The Atlantic discusses the societal pressure women face now to condense a lifetime of experience into a few formative years in our twenties. I've been acutely aware of this in the past, say, year, which has taken me from twenty six years old to twenty seven. At twenty six, I still felt like I had all the time in the world to find a relationship steady enough for lifelong commitment. Suddenly, at twenty seven, it seems like my time is running out and I'd better get settled right now.

This is, of course, ridiculous. I have never wanted to get married for the sake of marriage. It's too big a commitment for that. My value to society is not measured in whether or not I contribute to the traditional nuclear family, or how quickly I get to it. My worth and attractiveness are not declining as I become more centered and professionally successful.

Despite all of these things I know to be true, there is the nagging voice that tells me I should be married by now, or at least planning my wedding. I resent this subconscious assumption. It does not take into account individual circumstances. It assigns a correct age at which one apparently ought to be coupled up and settled down. That correct age spans roughly three months between the period in which we're all supposed to be running around sewing our wild oats, and the period in which we have passed our prime and become desperate, aging slowly on the shelf, beginning to stink of spoil.

By letting this voice continue, I condone this assumption that my worth is tied to my relationship status. It's hard to silence decades of programming, but I'm going to try. There's no perfect age for anything. My life is great, and is not full of things I'm not ready for. I like it that way.

And then there are days like today, when I go two miles and get cramps in three different spots. My right knee, the bad one, started aching, and the arch of my foot was not happy. Maybe my body likes sprinting and long distance and nothing in between. In any case, I feel better for having run. My boss came in this morning and reported that his wife has the flu, at which point I started to feel flushed and stuffy. Probably all in my head, but I wanted to squeeze the run in today in case I feel terrible tomorrow. Look at me, planning ahead.

I've started training to run a half marathon in May. I have never been a good distance runner. I'm slow, I'm sort of lazy, and I never want to go far.

And then today I set out for a run with my running buddy. Last week I set a personal record of 5.45 miles. This week I decided to set my goal at 6 miles. Before this point, the farthest I had ever run in one go was five miles, and that was one time when I was 21. Today I ran a little over 7.

It's remarkable what a body can do when you treat it decently and allow it to surprise you.

I didn't sleep very well last night, and today I feel like tenderized meat.

 I'm reading Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts. The books covers the story of Ambassador Dodd, a Chicago history professor who was assigned, through a series of misadventures, the post of Ambassador to Germany in 1933. It's a beautifully written and exhaustively researched book. Larson balances the homework he did with a fluid and engaged writing style. I have attempted this blend in shorter bursts, and every time I took a piece into workshop all of my classmates hated it. What I'm saying is that it's a difficult line to walk, and Larson does it well.

Reading this book has me thinking about the modern style of murder mystery, which is no the longer the whodunnit. More common now is to open with the tragedy, either the act or the aftermath, and either the real or suspected culprit. This builds a different kind of suspense than the traditional formula. It's a cymbal crash that recedes into a low, erie hum, one that sustains (if well written) for the length of the book.

The idea here is that what you know is coming can be more terrible than what you can imagine. It's chilling now to read about Martha Dodd's lunchtime meeting with Hitler, an attempt on the part of her Nazi officer friend to set the two up, because we know how it ends. (Martha, thank goodness, wasn't to Hitler's taste and never started dating him.) We all like to think we'd know evil, that we would recognize it and be brave enough to stand against it. We like to imagine ourselves better than we are.

To end with a fun anecdote: I was reading this book right before bed last night. Then I was ruminating on something else that upset me yesterday, and had trouble falling asleep. It got bad enough that at one point I actually said to myself, "Stop thinking about this, and just think about the Nazis." Guess what? It didn't help.

On a more cheerful note, here are some totally mind-blowing color photographs of Paris in the early part of the 20th century.