This past week was pretty good and pretty awful, but let's stick to the former for the purposes of writing publicly on the Internet, eh? This past week was helpful, I'll say, in my finding some clarity and direction around "what's next" for me professionally. I mean, I've finished the personal fitness trainer coursework (haha) and I took the practice quiz and without studying at all managed to get a passing grade (hahaha). That's not the plan for "what's next," but it's related to the next writing project, which I've started working on (yay) and feel pretty good about (yay yay yay).

A new writing project means, of course, lots of new research, so I've restarted my old process of gathering links throughout the week of things both directly and contextually related to the topic. Here's what I bookmarked this week:

• "'A little bit of perfection': The California McDonald's that invented the Egg McMuffin" — Yeah, no surprise: the new project in part involves the history of food and the history of stories about food, breakfast in particular
• "Queen of clean Marie Kondo says she has 'kind of given up' on tidying at home" — One of the things I'm interested in is the ways in which "influencers" and their particular practices — particularly practices about bodies and spaces — are crowned and de-throned
• "UC Berkeley fires storied women's swim coach after probe confirms reports of toxic bullying" — I just finished reading Lauren Fleshman's Good for a Girl: My Life Running in a Man's World. She has plenty to say about the toxicity of coaching in running, but it's pervasive throughout sports. But as long as coaches and their athletes are winning, people are more than willing to turn a blind eye to it, even when the damage is obvious
• "'My Watch Thinks I'm Dead'" — And yeah, no surprise: the new project in part involves a criticism of technology and the ways in which technologies and data imagine our bodies should function
• "USDA announces rigorous new school nutrition standards" — There is no escaping education or education technology for me — not when "standards" are everywhere, and as such foundational to data collection and analysis. These new rules come on the heels of the obesity guidelines released by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and if you guessed that my new writing project involves the technologies of "healthy behavior" — around food and fitness — you are pretty damn perceptive
• "Writer Roxane Gay Takes the Trip of a Lifetime" — it's been a while since Kin and I hit the road in our RV, as we canceled January's excursion due to the massive rainfall that California experienced. Traveling with Kin is one of my favorite things in the whole world — it's such a relief, incidentally, for both of us that Poppy too is a good traveler — and I think we're all missing The Adventure.

I had breakfast with my lifting coach this past week, which was amazing because she's amazing — coach, friend, mentor, etc. We ate breakfast burritos and tried to analyze what exactly went into this particular version — it had a green chili sauce that wasn't too cheesy and potatoes that were seasoned well and a tortilla that could withstand — yeah, I'll say it — reheating in the microwave. She also went through all the exercises that my physical therapist has given me and revamped my lifting routine to focus on single leg work after my four main lifts (squat and bench on Tuesdays and deadlift and overhead press on Thursday).

In other breakfast news, I had donuts from Happy Donuts twice this week: a strawberry fritter on Friday with the donut run crew and again on Sunday after the half-marathon training run. I ran with a faster group, which was fine physically and great socially. It's a race week, so tune in next Monday for results of my first 10K. Goal is to run it under an hour.