Weekend Roundup

Over the weekend, I plowed through the rest of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, because I couldn’t wait to read Elizabeth Gilbert’s eagerly anticipated sequel Committed. I was not disappointed!

I have to say that reading these two books so closely together makes an impact! The juxtaposition of the narrative voice of a submissive traditional Chinese female and the modern professional Westernized woman is quite remarkable. I cried while reading one and laughed out loud with the other.

To quote Gilbert (my hero) on the subject of the childless professional woman:

“Moreover, as I aged, I discovered that I loved my work as a writer more and more, and I didn’t want to give up even an hour of that communion. Like Jinny in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, I felt at times ‘a thousand capacities’ spring up in me, and I wanted to chase them all down and make every last one of them manifest. Decades ago, the novelist Katherine Mansfield wrote in one of her youthful diaries, ‘I want to work!’--and her emphasis, the hard-underlined passion of that yearning, still reaches across the decades and puts a crease in my heart. I, too, wanted to work. Uninterruptedly. Joyfully.”

What does this have to do with sailing? Absolutely nothing. Truman ran 17 miles this weekend. I ran 4. I flew to Denver for a Boston Scientific Cadaver Course on pelvic reconstruction products. I made a yummy bulgar-wild rice-cabbage-onion-herbes-de-provence-green pea salad to take to the Super Bowl Party. Packed in some dark beer. Did some No Meat Athlete Blog reading.

Absolutely fantastic! Uninterruptedly! Joyfully!
~Lauren