The market is intended to be a celebration of street food, and basically its a big food truck round-up.  Notable representatives from the local mobile food scene pull up and park on specially closed city streets, joined by some brick-and-mortar establishments camping out under rented tents.  People can nom their way through a large variety of cuisines, the market set-up allowing for a kind of DIY tasting menu approach.

The festival started around 6 and went until 10; I arrived just after 6 and headed straight for a beer tent.  I was encouraged by the ten minute wait for a tasty pint of local brew in a plastic cup.  Maybe the stories I’d heard about epic hour-long waits for some kimchi-topped Korean BBQ were exaggerated.

Twenty or so minutes later, and it was clear that no one had exaggerated about the lines.  I’ve been to many street festivals in Philadelphia over the years – and quite a few in New York – and I had never seen a mass of humans like this at any remotely similar event.  I waited half an hour — first in one line to order, and then in another to receive my order — for two small tacos that were relatively inexpensive at 4 bucks each, until you consider that came out to more than a buck a bite.  Then I waited twenty more minutes elsewhere to be handed a single scoop of ice cream, another 4 dollars for what amounted to a large tablespoon of rapidly melting ice cream precariously clinging to a small cone.

Still hungry, I looked around for more to eat.  But all I saw was an endless sea of people forming comically long lines that snaked  down blocks and threaded through each other as the roving crowd tried to make their way past in order to reach other equally long lines somewhere down the street.

I lasted an hour and a half altogether before I ducked out on a side street and started making my way home, hungry and a bit irritable, exhausted and overwhelmed by the surging crowd.  I microwaved a frozen burrito, had a glass of wine, and mentally crossed off the night market from my Philadelphia to-do list.  I had finally done it, and discovered that once was enough.

The view, as I was leaving:

Entirely too many humans.

Friday morning I wake up and start throwing things into a carry-on , trying to guess whether it’s going to be winter or spring in New York, whether we’ll end up going out to dinner or dancing, and what shoes I’ll regret not taking.  I will pack things I won’t need and forget things I will want later, but no matter what I pack it will be both too much and not enough.  In short, I pack for trips like a woman.

I also realized, now that I leave my apartment for small stretches with such frequency, that I am a typical woman not just in how I pack, but in how I leave.  I don’t just get myself ready to go; I prepare my home for my absence. I think there is some proverb that asks “If the house is spotlessly clean before you go out of state, does anyone sleep better at night?” and the answer is yes.  Women do.

Men don’t understand why women need to clean a house to get ready for no one being in it.  Men can leave dirty dishes in the sink and lock the door behind them, knowing they’ll be gone for days.  I haven’t yet met a woman who can do this (but if you exist, please tell me your secret! medication? lobotomy?).

I can only conclude that it must be some facet of the nesting instinct, because there are far too many of us frantically dusting lampshades and bleaching curtains before a vacation for this to be a mere social construct.

It was beautiful–nearly perfect–running weather in Philadelphia this evening.  Cool but sunny, breezy but not windy, with no humidity to be found.  Today was the kind of day we should have had throughout March and April, but this year those months were busy doing their best impersonation of February. Now I’m afraid we’re running out of our allotment of spring; too soon summer will take over completely and running in Philadelphia will feel like nestling in the armpit of an obese cafeteria lady.

Outdoor running has never been something I cared for; I only took up running at all eight years ago.  Before that I just heaved and retched once I approached a slow jog and assumed that I simply couldn’t run.  It runs out that the trick to building up to steady running from nothing is interval training, cross training, and a reservoir of anger toward an ex-boyfriend.

I started running on a treadmill, and I stuck with running on a treadmill for as long as I was regularly running.  When I was sidelined by injury, my doctor suggested I add outside running into the mix.  I was reluctant.  Everything that outside runners hate about treadmill running — the monotony of the view, the unchanging terrain underfoot, the stale climate-controlled air — I loved.  Running was still hard enough for me — I didn’t want to introduce variables, which I viewed solely as obstacles.

Today I am stronger than ever, but still I was surprised with my endurance over the course of an easy 3-mile run over changing inclines.  Ah-ha!  I thought at first.  I can totally do this.  This outside running thing, it’s great!  It’s not so hard and it’s even kind of interesting.

And then the first person from out of nowhere passed me on the sidewalk.  And then another.  And then a lot more, and then so many more that I stopped counting.  And I experienced something that I hadn’t since being lapped on the track during gym class in high school — the immediate self-judgement of being passed by another runner.

I’m sure people who race and compete know this feeling well; or, they’ve discovered a way to channel it into something positive.  I merely absorbed the vague unease I felt about apparently being the slowest person on the streets of Philadelphia, and began to understand what else it was about running on the treadmill that had always attracted me.

The line of treadmills at the gym is almost a democracy of athleticism; it doesn’t matter how fast someone is actually going on their conveyor belt  or how fast I am going on mine.  We are all suspended at the perpetual finish line of an equal outcome; starting at the same place, going nowhere, and then finishing there together.

But no, that’s not really a democracy at all.  The guy running fast and hard — with sweat pooling on the floor behind him and his breath growing ragged — well, it seems somehow wrong for him to be suspended continuously in the exact same space as a girl with a minuscule stride and her eyes locked on the nearby TV.

My affection for the treadmill, I think, stems from the same source as liberals’ affection for socialism.  It’s ultimately a desire to make success and failure, effort and apathy, and passion and obligation all appear to be equivalent until effectively, they are.

Maybe it’s time for me to stay outside and run like a capitalist.

The first few times he couldn’t reach me he thought I was being a jerk.  The next few times he couldn’t reach me, he went into a panic.  The times after that and Enough was Enough.  I called Sprint and learned that there were “service upgrades” happening and hopefully the disruptions would cease soon.  In the next week or so.  Probably. They apologized for the inconvenience and asked for my patience and offered that they could credit me 25 bucks for the hassle.

I called back, because missing important calls from people for whom I am the sole point of contact on certain matters is not a hassle.  It is a potentially career-ending, relationship-killing huge fucking problem that only Sprint customers in this city seem to be having.  And I talked to some supervisor’s supervisor and I got nowhere on being let out of contract without an ETF or being credited an amount of money would offset that ETF.  As far as Sprint is concerned, this level of service falls within their acceptable bounds.

Sprint CS explained that they couldn’t guarantee service everywhere people go. I explained that if they couldn’t guarantee service smack-dab in the middle of the fifth largest city in the United States, then they should stop pretending to be a major national cellular carrier.  Maybe get Candace Bergen back and try to sell people some long distance minutes again.

Sprint 4G map of Philly via sensorly.com

The circled areas are where I happen to spend a good deal of time, in the center of the city, where coverage is looking a little sparse according to this map.  The other areas of Philadelphia that have similar-looking coverage on this map are places where people regularly get shot.  Sprint 4G: The social equalizer.

When I was with the Russian lover in NYC, I thought I was pretty good with 4G for much of the time we were bumming around Manhattan.  But there, too, it didn’t seem consistently good.  So today I also pulled up the 4G map for New York; the circled area is where the Russian lover’s crash pad is located, and where we spend a fair amount of time:

Foiled again.

And now I think I understand the main reason people want to be famous.  Because if there is one thing celebrities are not, it is helpless consumers in the face of inferior products and services.  If Beyonce called Pepsi saying “This new soda of yours I just tried is gross”, Pepsi would not be like “Thank you for your valuable feedback.  We are so sorry” and leave Beyonce out a couple of bucks.  They would respond by dispatching a team tasked with creating a new soda to Beyonce’s specifications.  Meanwhile, when Coke got wind of her displeasure, they’d offer her a billion dollars to abandon her Pepsi endorsement.  A bidding war would ensue.  Beyonce would be gifted with endless amounts of gratis superior cola product.  That is consumer power.

Somehow, I don’t think any service provider is going to try to hold Beyonce hostage to her cell phone contract.  The rest of us?  We just have to yell and tweet and blog and try to band together until enough of us add up to one Beyonce.  Because the only hope we regular people have against incompetent corporate tyrants like the now network is the momentum of our human networks.

But I am not, it would seem, an adventurer by nature. I take calculated gambles that sometimes seem crazy to even more wary folks, but for the most part I prefer to play it safe.  Sometimes, far too safe.  And this is something about myself which I loathe perhaps the most of all.  Even more than my intractable cellulite.

This week I was reading a story in a weekly city rag about an old acquaintance of the Russian lover’s; she has gone on to make a infamous name for herself doing infamous things that may one day limit her career options in politics or early childhood education, but she has found success and happiness and lives with authenticity.  She’s beautiful, intelligent, and well-spoken.  She does not play it safe.

Reading about her – her life and her approach to life – I couldn’t help but feel envy.  I am sometimes mildly jealous of other people for having things I don’t have, or for not having to deal with things I do, but full-blown envy only happens when I encounter someone who seems to have figured out how to live their life better than I could ever hope to live my own.  I feel especially gutted by those women who seem to have not just all the things, but more importantly be all the things, that somehow I just can’t.

I think at its worst, envy is not actually about wanting to be someone else; it’s about wanting to find a way to be yourself as well as someone else has found to be their self.  At the core, I think very few people actually suffer from genuine or total self-loathing; in fact, although we’re culturally conditioned to be publicly self-abasing, most people believe themselves to be pretty fucking great. Low self-esteem is not what plagues us; if anything, we have too much esteem.  What we don’t have is the ability to translate that esteem into lives fully lived.  We hold back.  Most of us do, anyway.

The Russian lover does not hold back.  In classic relationship motif, this was something about him that attracted me at first and then began to annoy me as the years went by; in my eyes, his most endearing quality became his fatal flaw.  I contemplated the future of the relationship.

And then I asked myself why this thing about him that I used to love was bothering me so much, and I came to the conclusion that it was because I felt so separated from his unfiltered, unafraid engagement with the world.  In those moments where he boldly had a confrontation or took action toward the future, I felt timid and lost beside him.

And I reached the realization that at least one person in a relationship must have if two people are going to stay together: I decided the problem was with me. I was the one convinced that he should try to be a tamed version of himself while fighting my own demons of repression.  Where I was not succeeding I determined he should, a little bit, fail.

That is the most toxic dynamic that can be introduced in a relationship.

I snapped out of it because, in the end, I wanted to be with the Russian lover.  And I wanted the Russian lover to be the Russian lover.  Finally, I understood that I was trying to censor him because I was afraid to be the uncensored version of myself.  Playing it safe was becoming who I was, not just something I preferred to do.  And it damn near destroyed not just my relationship, but both of the people in it.

So, envy. Stumbling across the paper last week made it obvious that I haven’t quite reached a place where I am convinced my choices are entirely based on knowing myself and my desires and not based on fear and avoidance.  Because what I envy about that other girl isn’t her looks (and yes, she’s prettier), her success (and yes, she’s richer), or her fame (and yes, you’ve heard of her).  I envy the pure sense of freedom she has about herself.

I think if I can find that, the rest will take care of itself.