Since moving into our new apartment almost one month ago, Zdenek and I have been on a bit of a home furnishing frenzy. In fact, we’ve made so many big-ticket purchases in the last while that my bank has put a freeze on my credit card not once, but twice, assuming fraudulent activity. But Zdenek and I have been living like students for years -- despite the fact that our student days are but a distant memory -- and so unfortunately everything we’ve purchased thus far has really been a first-time acquisition after five years of dorm-like living: bedroom furniture (which allowed us to throw away the plastic storage boxes we’ve been using in place of drawers, and to place our mattress on a bed, rather than the floor); a kitchen table (that is quite a big bigger and definitely nicer than the poker-table-sized piece of junk off which we’ve been dining); a flat-screen TV (replacing our beloved 1995 Sony Trinitron); and a wall unit (providing a place for our new TV and storage space to boot). Though we still have a few more purchases to make (and let’s not even think about where the +1 is supposed to go), the apartment is beginning to approach something resembling the dwelling of two thirty-somethings.
Because most of our previous furniture was (a) IKEA, (b) plastic or pine, and (c) terribly ugly, we’ve been throwing most of it away rather than attempting to make a few bucks by selling it to real students. The other night, though, after we made the decision to buy a new dining set, I figured I might as well advertise the IKEA kitchen cart that has served as extra counter space for the past five years. I put together a nice photo, wrote a few lines of text, and posted the ad on Craiglist. Within 20 minutes, I had received three inquiries from people wishing to pick it that same evening, and at 10 pm, no later than three hours after posting the ad, my kitchen cart was wheeled away by two young girls who trekked up from Gramercy to collect it.
Even more surprisingly, up until a day ago, I received a total of 20 or more emails about this kitchen cart. I finally decided to delete the ad altogether; it was so far buried in the Craiglist classifieds that I couldn’t even find it, so I'm not sure how everyone else was managing. (Apparently, kitchen carts are a hot commodity in Manhattan apartments, and if I should ever be in need of work, I think I know just the line of business to enter.) This whole ordeal made me laugh because we paid $99 for that thing five years ago, and although it was still in good condition, it wasn’t really anything special. But when I was on the phone with the girl who ended up buying it, she enthusiastically described it to her roommate as “AWESOME.” I guess it’s true what they say: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
That proverb applies these days not only to furniture, but to my running, too. While my cycling remains solid (it seems less affected by the extra being I’m toting around), my running has definitely been slower-going for the past four months. I’m managing to keep up with my mileage (and, combined with my biking, haven’t had or wanted a rest day in two weeks), but I’m simply not able to make my paces of a few months ago: my comfortable 8-8:15 min/mile run has morphed into an 8:45-9:00 min/mile jog (and is even slower when the weather is particularly scorching). And yet, I am amazed that I am passing plenty of men and women on every loop. Speed is definitely relative.
I may not be as fast as I would like right now (though hopefully I will be at some point again in the future), but at least I’m moving and am still doing so at a respectable pace. I realize that, just as I was smart enough to not trash my kitchen cart, I shouldn’t be so quick to trash my running. It is still, after all, AWESOME.
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