Pumped

My insulin pump, a Medtronic Paradigm 722, is worth $7000. It is also two years old, banged up, and covered in little bits of dust, dirt and my own skin, but the price still remains. It is also not waterproof.

It is also, now, broken.

Yesterday marked the meandering start to Toronto's first heat wave of the year: slightly sticky, a little heavy, mostly pleasant. The temperature was stable at 25 when I went for my run at 6pm. I usually remove my pump when I run: too much basal insulin makes me bottom out, and the thing is so fucking expensive, right? What if I trip and smash it? What if my tubing gets caught in a tree branch? Yesterday, though, I decided to keep it on. I shouldn't have it detached for more than an hour at a time, and my training distances will keep going up in advance of my races this year.

So I kept it on, clipped to the inside of my sports bra. Around 11km I dug it out to check the time. It was slick with sweat. Pressed a button. Nothing happened. Pressed another. Nothing happened. The clock was still working alright, but the buttons, it seems, were brucked. When I got home I blasted it with a hair dryer. It started to beep at me like a crazy person. Then it flashed its final message: "BUTTON ERROR".

The jig was up.

This pump may not be waterproof, but it should, at least, prove sweatproof. I'm not a terribly sweaty individual. I didn't drop it in the toilet. It shouldn't stop working for this. I picked up the phone prepared to give Medtronic a piece of my mind...but the customer service agent I spoke to was so surprisingly nice I couldn't even muster up rage. Instead of the standard 24 hour wait, they had a replacement pump sent by courier to me within the hour.

This new pump isn't dented or covered in old skin cells either, so, y'know, every cloud.

21km and Type 1: On Shorts

My dad used to run cross country in high school. He told my brother and I stories about his past "running career" as we embarked on our own, but it was hard to take him seriously. My dad, beer-bellied and forever old, could not have been a runner, right? Some of his stories were a little hard to believe (like the one about him winning the regional championship, or how they had to run through rivers on the course, or how he claimed to have started the 1960's trend of wearing running shoes casually (my personal fav)). But then again, he did have the shorts.

The shorts. Teeny tiny blue satin running shorts edged in red. He even had a yellowed photograph of himself wearing them--proof enough for me.

I decided to wear them for OFSAA 2002. It was November and freezing. The shorts barely fit me (shit, my dad was skinnier at 16 than I was?) and they reeked of oak cabinet and must. I don't even remember my time or place in that race; I don't remember much beyond the shorts, and that's why I'm so thankful for them.

It's also why I need new shorts. I've been wearing the same running stuff for years. I've been wearing down my Dri-Fits slowly, convincing myself that I didn't deserve / couldn't afford the wardrobe of a real runner. My boring old black shorts symbolize nothing good to me; they sum up the last few years I spent adjusting basal rates, injuring my legs and training intermittently. It's time for me to change...shorts. Not sure if I'll go for blue satin though.

The Bachelorette Looky-likeys

I watch The Bachelor without fail every season, but it's never as entertaining as The Bachelorette. "The Bette" lasts just as long--two hours every week, are you kidding me Mike Fleiss?--but its cast of potential suitors always keeps me interested way longer than The Bach's fleet of catty bitches.

Season 7 started last night and already promises to be unsophisticated, disingenuous, messy and hilarious. Here are the best cast lookalikes we spotted during last night's episode.

Contestant: William

Josh Lucas, anyone?

Contestant: Frank

Contestant: Constantine 

There are at least 3 Grobans on this season.

Contestant: JP

 Pitter patter.

Contestant: Michael

Contestant: Tim

image sources: abc.go.com, too many to name

Hunting For: Pull-Down School Maps

I've had old school maps (literally: school maps that are old) on my radar for a while now. I love cartography in general, but these pull-down scrolls are something special. There's one hanging in the back portion of The Ossington--every trivia night I hope to get a geography question about South America so I can use the map to my advantage, but it hasn't happened yet. Pretty and functional.

(images via 1, 2)

These aren't hard-to-find treasures. I know where they're at ( The Queen West Antique Centre, for one), but they've always been out of reach, money-wise. This summer I'm making it a mission to buy one at a price that suits my post-grad budget. I have a few tricks up my sleeve: my boyfriend's step-dad, a teacher in Southwestern Ontario, is keeping tabs on schools in the area that might be closing down; I've been checking listings for school auctions out in the country; and then there's Christie. These fingers are crossed. Map: I'm gonna get you.

A Wing and a Prayer

It's been a while since I've be truly excited for a film adaptation of a book. When I was younger, books-to-movies used to make me crazy; I love books and movies in equal measure, so the chance to have both, one after the other, could send me into a tizzy. (It's only now, at age 25, that I've started to realize my emotional attachments to art and media might be a touch freakish.) Sometimes the book to movie transition is smooth; other times, not so much.

I crossed my fingers for the Owen Meany movie. I swallowed that book up when I was 12, in the sixth grade, while my peers were still reading the Babysitter's Club Little Sister series, and felt so adult. An Owen Meany movie couldn't fail, right? And then I met "Simon Birch".

I basically peed my pants over The Virgin Suicides. I'd read the book in the fall of my grade 10 year, knowing that Sofia Coppola's movie was already in the pipeline. The book made me cry. I watched the movie on a Christmas eve. They both hit me, in different ways, equally hard.

Which brings me to this year's model: Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin. The movie is premiering at Cannes. The book I wasn't expecting to like nearly as much as I did.

I came away from Kevin's final page legitimately terrified of having kids. Granted, 'having kids' is a scary notion on its own, but this was different: what if my kid is horrible? What if they do something horrible? What if I don't love them.

Shriver's novel is oftentimes overwrought, repetitive and insincere. I've never read another book, though, that so thoroughly engrossed me in motherhood. I'm not a mother, won't be for a while, but I came away from this book thinking like a mother. Feeling like a mother, probably, too. I bought my mom a copy to read after I did. I expected her to feel as affected as I had been, but it didn't quite pan out that way. She found it more unsettling than affecting, which I suppose marks the difference between a real mom and a maybe-future-mom.

A few clips from the movie were released this week. It took me two days to finally watch them. I was hoping for Virgin Suicides but expecting another Simon Birch. I'm a fan of SWINTON, and I'd die for John C. Reilly, but I just wasn't buying them in the roles. When I finally bit down and watched the clips (what if I don't love them), I realized that my fears had been misplaced.

The movie, at least, looks good.

We Need to Talk About Kevin clip 3 by Flixgr

My future kids might still turn out to be mass murderers, though.