March Madness: Update (and Nightstand 2014: Week Eleven)

Just a quick update on March Madness (my month-long challenge to try something new or scary every day).

I’ve completed or started nine challenges in 10 days. Since we last spoke, I’ve seen a psychic, purchased a professional camera (classes soon to follow), and gone vegan for a day. I also ran an off-road trail that I haven’t been on since my marathon training days nearly 20 years ago. It was a nice surprise, as I was with friends who guided me to it. It wasn’t long before it dawned on me where we were and how much I’d loved running up and down its simple hills in summers past.

It’s been a good little project thus far, and I continue to amuse myself with the daily discomfort and twinges of angst. Wakes one up after a dreary winter.

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What I’m reading this week:

• “AWP 2014: Effective Research Strategies in Creative Nonfiction” by Scott Russell Morris (“Nonfiction” blog, Brevity Magazine, March 6, 2014)
• “The ‘Boys’ in the Bunkhouse” by Dan Barry (The New York Times, March 9, 2014)
• “Hope, Failure, and Binoculars — Meditations on Minor White” by Alec Soth (“Little Brown Mushroom” blog, March 7, 2014)
• “The Reckoning” by Andrew Solomon (The New Yorker, March 17, 2014)
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (1990)
• “What Lou Reed Taught Me About Love” by Lisa Selin Davis (The New York Times, March 6, 2014)
• “The Wildebeest in the Room” by Penelope Green (The New York Times, March 5, 2014)