An Adorable Animals Advent Calendar: December 18
↧
↧
23 Words That Are Spelled Differently In Canada
*Compared to our American friends.
BuzzFeed Canada / Thinkstock
BuzzFeed Canada / Thinkstock
BuzzFeed Canada / Thinkstock
BuzzFeed Canada / Thinkstock
↧
The Tragic Downfall Of The Ugly Christmas Sweater
A chance for redemption before death.
Once upon a time, The Ugly Christmas Sweater was a pinnacle of glory.
MIramax / Via youtube.com
Our forefathers' and foremothers' closets were filled with these unimaginable specimens.
That we would unveil unabashedly at parties where we knew no one.
Because the grislier the sweater, the more legendary we became.
↧
15 Tattoos That Couldn't Exist Before 2015
These people will remember 2015…fondly?
The Infamous Pizza Rat.
Instagram: @kativaughn / Via instagram.com
This joyful Drake doing the Hotline Bling dance.
And this text-y Hotline Bling, too.
instagram.com / Via instagram.com
This somber Drake album title.
Instagram: @filippoconta / Via instagram.com
↧
The People You Needed To Read About In 2015
From a recovering teen meme to a historical cipher to Instagram superstars to the leader of the men’s rights movement, here are some of the most fascinating people we spent time with this year.
Jared Harrell / BuzzFeed News
The Unbreakable Rebecca Black — Reggie Ugwu
Four years ago, she introduced the world to the most hated (and maddeningly unforgettable) song in a generation, was passed over by the music industry, and turned into a punchline — all before she was old enough for a learner's permit. Now 18, Rebecca Black is too famous to be normal and too normal to be famous. So what does she have to smile about?
Photograph by Joyce Lee for BuzzFeed News
16: Mackensie Is Pulling Out Her Hair — Jessica Testa
Welcome to the first installment of "16," a BuzzFeed News series about ordinary people at the weirdest age. Meet a teenager with trichotillomania who is trying to be more than the girl in class who pulls her hair out.
Photograph by Bryan Meltz for BuzzFeed News
Tess Holliday Is The Biggest Thing To Ever Happen To Modeling — Amanda Shapiro
At size 22, Tess Holliday is the largest model ever signed by a major agency. Can she spin her social media stardom into a career in the high-stakes (and notoriously body-conscious) modeling world?
Macey J. Foronda / BuzzFeed News
↧
↧
Transgender-Cisgender Couples Talk About Their Relationships
BuzzFeed Yellow / Via youtube.com
↧
How To Make The Ultimate Spaghetti With Red Sauce
Because canned tomatoes are always in season.
Lauren Zaser/Alice Mongkongllite / Via BuzzFeed
So, you've had Spaghetti With Red Sauce before. Maybe the sauce came from a can. Maybe you've made your own sauce.
Food-Gifs.com / Via giphy.com
It's got a very special secret ingredient that will improve the quality of your life/pasta.
Here's what you'll need:
For the full recipe, jump to the bottom of this post.
Lauren Zaser / Via BuzzFeed
↧
14 Indian Cover Men That Made Us Damn Thirsty In 2015
Proceed at your own risk.
2015 was the year Shah Rukh Khan turned 50 and did this sweltering game-changer of a photoshoot for Vogue India.
Vogue India
2015 was the year when we fell more madly in love with Arjun Kapoor with this Maxim photoshoot.
↧
The 25 Most Drab Celebrity Looks Of 2015
As decided by you!
BuzzFeed
Serayah At The 2015 VMAs Fab or drab?
With 1381 "Drab" votes.
Jason Merritt / Getty Images
Boy George Attends The Kill Your Friends VIP After Party
With 1382 "Drab" votes.
FameFlynetUK/FAMEFLYNET PICTURES
Kourtney Kardashian At Marquee Dayclub At The Cosmopolitan In Las Vegas
With 1397 "Drab" votes.
FPA/FAMEFLYNET PICTURES
↧
↧
How BB-8 Are You?
Droid please.
Even if you haven't seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens yet, chances are you have heard of BB-8.
Just in case you are some kind of isolated desert scavenger and missed the marketing, here he is, hanging out with an isolated desert scavenger.
Lucasfilm / Disney Studios
He's the spunkiest, bravest, cutest little droid since R2-D2 taught us all that trash cans could be lovable.
Trust me. We've met.
Disney / Via collider.com
↧
22 Times Dogs Embodied What It's Like To Have Siblings
There are good times, and there are BAD times.
When one of you is in trouble and the other acts EXTRA good just to show off:
When you have to fend for yourself to get the most food possible before it's gone:
When your mom introduces you all to her work friends:
And they already know every detail of your lives.
↧
21 Tweets That Prove Instagram Is Just The Worst
↧
BuzzFeed Employees React To Twenty One Pilots Because Someone Asked Us To
Would not trust them to fly a plane.
Let's start with the first pilot.
Wavebreakmedia Ltd / Getty Images
Here's our reaction: Pretty good Pilot.
BuzzFeed
But we soon realized Twenty One Pilots is the name of a musical group.
Kevin Winter / Getty Images
↧
↧
The 24 Funniest Tweets About Cats In 2015
↧
Love In The Time Of Deportation: A Doomed Romance In A Broken Prison System
Luis and J.B. met one night in a dorm housing immigrant detainees at the LaSalle Detention Facility in central Louisiana. The prisoner count was low that night, and Luis was one of a handful of inmates mopping the floor while J.B., a correctional officer, sat in a chair and watched over them.
Luis approached J.B. and started making small talk. She asked the question she normally asked detainees: Was he going home, or was he fighting his case?
“I’m going to fight it,” Luis said. “Because I have a daughter.”
They spoke for a few moments about their children; J.B.'s oldest was 8, the same age as Luis’s daughter. Luis was short and muscular, with a sly smile. J.B. had a streak of blonde in her straight brown hair. “I’m not gonna say it was love at first sight,” Luis later said, “but the first I seen her, I liked her.”
Luis went back to mopping when another prison guard brought J.B. some food. As she sat and ate from her takeout container, some of the detainees pestered her half-jokingly to save them some. Luis made a show of telling them to leave her alone.
Then he sidled up to her. “So,” he said. “You going to give me some?”
J.B. laughed at him. “Didn’t you just tell those other guys to leave me alone?”
“Well,” Luis said, “you can’t share with six people, but you can share with one.”
J.B. waved him away. Luis sidled up again a few minutes later.
“So,” he said. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
J.B. was seeing someone, but considered it a casual thing. “Yeah, pretty much,” she said.
“Well, let me know when you break up with him,” Luis said.
In the months that followed, J.B. and Luis began to contrive reasons to find themselves in the same parts of the prison. They exchanged notes, then long, handwritten letters, and they spent hours at night talking on the phone. They fell in love. Late in the spring, J.B. quit her job.
J.B. worked for the GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies in the business of incarcerating immigrants the government wants to deport. She was 26, with three kids, and she needed the kind of money that only GEO could pay in her corner of rural Louisiana. (J.B. asked that her identity be protected for fear that sharing information about her previous employer would jeopardize future job opportunities.)
Luis — José Luis Sanchez — was brought to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 11 years old. In October, he turned 25 inside the LaSalle Detention Facility, where he was held for more than a year for deportation proceedings following an arrest for marijuana possession. Luis doesn’t fall under the government’s priorities for deportation, which are reserved for serious criminals and recent arrivals. He even qualifies for a federal program designed to prevent the deportation of immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
Still, immigration authorities pushed ahead with his deportation. This made Luis a long-term resident of the country’s vast immigrant detention system, a network of mostly for-profit prisons that operate on the margins of the American carceral state. The system houses tens of thousands of immigrants — many of whom, like Luis, committed minor crimes for which they already served their sentences — in prisons plagued by allegations of incompetence and abuse. Before she’d even met Luis, J.B. was dispirited by the inhumanity and incompetence of the prison that employed her.
This system irrevocably changed Luis’s life as well as J.B.'s, not least by bringing them together. Without it, the undocumented Mexican immigrant and the reluctant prison guard from a white Louisiana family would likely have never crossed paths.
Yet the system that brought them together may ultimately pull them apart again. On Dec. 10, after losing a critical appeal, Luis was moved from LaSalle to another facility, where he awaits the flight that will send him to Mexico.
Luis's mother, María Susana, holds up a picture of the family shortly after their arrival in Tennessee.
Jessica Tezak For Buzzfeed News
It was March 2002, and 11-year-old Luis was preparing to cross the U.S.-Mexico border from Piedras Negras into Texas. He was accompanied by his mother, María Susana, and his two brothers, one 6 years old and the other an infant.
They walked across a railroad, hopped a wooden fence, and then the flashing lights of a border patrol truck sent their group scattering. Luis was surrounded by a stampede of running adult legs. Unable to keep up, he found himself suddenly alone and seized by panic. After a few minutes, another migrant scooped him up and took him to the small group that remained.
Luis's mother and brothers were nowhere to be seen, and he was surrounded by strange men and women who seemed just as afraid as he was. One of their guides pointed to a light at the end of the desert, most likely San Antonio glowing against the night sky, and told them that’s where they had to go.
They took off across the desert, walking all night with cactus needles piercing their shoes and trying to rest during the day. Luis was afraid. Before the trip, María Susana had sewn the family’s entire savings into the lining of Luis’s tattered gray jacket, and in a safe house in Mexico he’d seen a coyote hold a gun to a man’s stomach after finding cash hidden in his belt. As they walked toward San Antonio, Luis saw discarded backpacks, piles of filthy clothes, and women’s underwear clinging to a tree. He also saw a woman’s dead body, a sight he still finds difficult to talk about.
Five days later, they made it to the outskirts of the city, where Luis was told that shortly after they were separated, his mother and brothers had been arrested and dropped off across the border. Now they were waiting to cross again. (“I completely lost my mind,” María Susana, Luis’s mother, said of this interval.) Luis was told to wait in an apartment belonging to a family with two children around his age, but he kept to himself.
Finally, Luis’s family arrived, and after a few tearful hugs they set off for Tennessee, where Luis’s father was living as an undocumented worker.
“Everything was nicer,” Luis said. “The roads were cleaner. The air was even clearer.”
Luis didn’t speak a word of English. One day in middle school, a white classmate threw Luis’s backpack on the floor and called him a beaner. He felt confused and powerless, then angry in a way he would feel many times to come. “I just got up and I, you know… I hit him,” he said. “More than a few times.”
High school — the almost entirely white Heritage High in Maryville, Tennessee — was worse. A group of older students who liked to wear rebel flag T-shirts set their sights on Luis and a couple of his Mexican friends. So they learned to respond to “wetback” and “spic” with punches.
These were the years that Luis adopted his swagger. He mastered his perfect but peculiar English, a cross between the twang of rural Tennessee and the clipped vowels of Mexico City. And he learned how to bluster. As he said recently, from prison, “I came to this world kicking and punching and full of blood, and I don’t mind going the same way.”
Clockwise from top left: Luis and his daughter; Luis and his brothers, Omar and Brayan; the Sanchez family; Luis at a school dance during his last months in Mexico.
Jessica Tezak for BuzzFeed News
It was 2005, and 16-year-old J.B. had just started dating a black classmate named T. J.B. was the eldest daughter in a white family with oil money. She was a quick-witted, hard-nosed teenager and a star catcher on her softball team. She was the family’s prized child. Until she started dating T.
“My family didn’t approve,” she said. (T.’s full name was withheld to protect J.B.'s identity.) One day she came home from school to find her entire family waiting for her. Her father and grandfather cried, asking, “Why do you want to do this to us?”
“It was really hard for me to understand,” J.B. said. “I was a perfect athlete, I was a straight-A student, I never snuck out, I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke. But I dated a black guy.” Her family objected, J.B. said, “not because they were racist, bad people — they weren’t. It’s a small town, and they were raised to know that you stay with your own color.” But J.B. was in love, so she continued to see T. in secret.
During J.B.'s sophomore year of high school, her stepmother accused her father of raping her at gunpoint. The local paper came out on Wednesdays, and her classmates eagerly read it every week for the sports news. One day it was there on the front page: “Jena Man Rapes Wife.”
J.B.'s father was sentenced to 15 years in prison. “I promise you I didn’t do this,” he told her when she visited him.
“Even if he lied to me, I believe him,” she said. “Because that’s what I have to believe.”
Her senior year, J.B. broke up with T. “I decided that I was tired of being in trouble all the time for something that I didn’t believe was wrong,” she said. Shortly after, she moved with her mother to an even smaller town some 40 miles north, partly to escape the fallout from her dad’s imprisonment. There, she began to date a white classmate. She didn’t have feelings for him like she had for T., but life got a little easier. “I had no rules anymore, because he was white.”
J.B. found out she was pregnant on the night before her softball playoffs, and her first thought was how much T. would hate her. Ashamed, she dropped out of school, got her GED, and moved back to Jena to ask T. to take her back. He did, agreeing to help raise J.B.'s child. But he had one condition: T. wanted children of his own. In the two years after her first child was born, J.B. and T. had two more, a son and a daughter.
Although they would come to treat her children lovingly, J.B.'s relationship with her family never fully recovered. “In a way it helped me, because I had no choice but to become independent,” she said.
J.B. and T. were happy for a time: He worked, and she cared for the kids and enrolled in nursing school. But shortly after they had gotten back together, T. was badly burned in an oil rig accident, and within a couple of years he received a large settlement. He started staying out late at night, buying girls drinks. “He didn’t know what to do with all that money,” J.B. said. “So he lost his mind.”
J.B. found out that T. had been cheating on her. One day she visited him at work on a land rig; when he wouldn’t touch her, she knew it was over. She had pushed her family away, and now she was losing the one she had made in its stead. “It was tearing me to pieces,” she said.
That night, J.B. went home and swallowed a bottle of diet pills. When she woke up in the hospital, alone, she was told she had flatlined twice.
J.B. emerged from the overdose with a renewed sense of purpose. She devoted herself to raising her children, working at least two jobs at a time: She waited tables, she worked at Walmart, she trained at H&R Block and worked there during tax season. Sometimes T. helped with child support, and sometimes he didn’t.
In 2011, one of J.B.’s friends got a job at the immigrant detention center on the edge of town, which everyone in Jena knew simply as GEO. J.B.’s friend encouraged her to apply: They were still hiring, she said, and you didn’t have to do much to get the job. J.B. felt wary, until she considered how different her life would be at $11.21 an hour.
Left to right: Luis's stepfather, José; his mother, María Susana; and his brother Omar at their home in Maryville, Tennessee.
Jessica Tezak for BuzzFeed News
During the Sanchez family’s years in Mexico City, Luis’s father played the accordion in a norteña band that rarely landed a real gig, and the loose change he picked up busking went straight to drink. So María worked long hours cleaning houses.
When Luis’s father migrated to the U.S. in 2001, he got a job extracting the pink marble that underlies much of eastern Tennessee. After María Susana arrived with the boys, he began to isolate her from the few friends she made and kept her from learning how to drive or speak English. “If you learn, you will have wings,” he would say. As in Mexico, most of his money went to local bars, so María Susana worked long hours, washing dishes at suburban chain restaurants and cleaning office buildings at night.
Luis loved and respected his mother, but he grew used to her absence, something for which she berates herself today. Largely free from supervision, Luis started smoking weed in his early teens. Freshman year of high school, he found out his girlfriend was pregnant. Luis proposed to her and spent every paycheck from his job at McDonald’s on his future family.
In the months after their daughter was born, Luis learned his fiancé had been seeing an older guy. “That just made me crazy,” he said. “How could she let somebody else hold my baby, and her baby?” At this time, Luis’s father was beating María Susana, both she and Luis said. María Susana went to the police, but they only issued a protective order that she was too afraid to enforce.
Luis felt himself losing control. Speaking to a counselor at school, he threatened suicide and was forcibly hospitalized for several months.
When he got out, Luis started smoking more heavily. He would skip school, get high, and spend the day wandering in the Smoky Mountains with friends. Later on, he became acquainted with an older man who worked at a billiards hall in Knoxville, which turned out to be a front for a weed- and cocaine-trafficking ring. Drawn to the lifestyle, Luis rubbed elbows with dealers and gangsters. He kept his head just level enough to continue seeing his daughter, who had been taken in by his ex’s mom. “I thought I was living the life,” he said. “I didn’t have to tell nobody how I was feeling.”
During Luis’s senior year, the feds busted the drug ring at the pool hall and hauled away about a dozen of his acquaintances, many of whom were deported. Luis didn’t want the same fate. “That’s kinda when I hit the brakes,” he said.
After graduating high school, Luis worked a series of minimum-wage jobs in restaurants and construction crews. He started attending a for-profit college, but his enrollment was rescinded after a background check turned up the fact that he was undocumented. Luis kept up his weed habit, and the only times he locked away his stash and stayed clean were the days he saw his daughter. He grew closer to his little brother Omar, making a point of driving him to soccer practice and showing up to cheer at his games.
In 2013, Luis moved back into María Susana’s house. The family remembers this as a golden era. Luis’s father had been deported to Mexico, a fact none of them mourned much, and María Susana took up with a reserved, diligent construction worker. He and Omar started a concrete-pouring company, and when the work picked up Luis quit his job to join them. To keep from smoking around his mom and the kids, Luis cut his intake down to one blunt before bed. “Everything was good,” he said.
On May 11, 2013, Luis was pulled over for speeding and caught with a bag of marijuana. Depending on the jurisdiction, when local police arrest someone they suspect as being undocumented, they can choose whether or not to alert immigration authorities; on this occasion, they didn’t. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor possession charge and got one year’s probation. After the arrest, Luis said, he quit smoking altogether.
On Oct. 1, 2014, Omar and Luis climbed into their work truck, a dusty ’88 Silverado piled with construction equipment. Luis, in the passenger seat, forgot to put on his seatbelt. As they approached a restaurant where their mother worked, an unmarked police car pulled them over. From inside, María Susana watched as the cops handcuffed Luis, ducked his head into a patrol car, and drove away.
The LaSalle Detention Facility sits behind two layers of chain link and barbed wire off a two-lane road on Jena’s northern edge. Jena is a small place; when all of LaSalle’s 1,160 beds are filled by immigrants, the town’s population rises by more than a third.
The facility originally opened as a juvenile prison in 1998, but it was forced to close following allegations of abuse just three years later. When it reopened in 2007, its corporate owner, the Wackenhut Corporation, had become the GEO Group, and immigrants were the new inmates.
In the mid-1990s, tough-on-immigration laws mandated the detention of tens of thousands of immigrants facing deportation. On any given day in 2015, some 34,000 immigrants are incarcerated in the U.S., more than triple the number in 1996, and Louisiana became a hub for immigrant detention and removal.
In the years since the reopening of LaSalle in 2007, the U.S. has begun to seriously reconsider its incarceration policies. But the push for reform has not extended to immigrants — instead, the opposite has happened. In 2009, Congress began to mandate that immigration authorities maintain a minimum number of detention beds. This rule has been widely interpreted to mean that the beds must be filled, ensuring that America’s system of immigrant incarceration, much of which is outsourced to companies like GEO, will not shrink.
GEO has more guaranteed beds than any other private prison company in the immigrant detention industry, according to federal contracts obtained by the Detention Watch Network and the National Immigrant Justice Center. These include a 770-bed minimum at LaSalle.
For J.B., as for many others in North Louisiana, this booming business translated to an opportunity for better-paying work than any other she could hope to get.
The LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena, Louisiana.
David Noriega / BuzzFeed News
↧
17 Hilarious Tweets About "Star Wars: The Force Awakens"
↧
If You're Excited For The New "Star Wars" Movie You Have To See This Art
An exclusive look at the art behind The Force Awakens. Excerpted from The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Set to release in conjunction with The Force Awakens in December 2015, the book features exclusive interviews with the entire creative team, imparting insights into director J. J. Abrams's vision, which includes unused "blue sky" concept art, and offering glimpses into roads not traveled. Bursting with hundreds of stunning works of art, including production paintings, concept sketches, storyboards, blueprints, and matte paintings, this visual feast will delight Star Wars fans and cineastes for decades to come.
Via Abrams Books
Hangar Bay (Pre-Production / September 2013)
“This Star Destroyer hangar has to look decrepit and huge and old, which was challenging. We went back through the classic trilogy, and the hangar is one of the only Star Destroyer sets you see, the only set that can conjure specific, iconic imagery.” —Ryan Church
Ryan Church
↧
↧
28 Pictures That Prove 2015 Wasn’t A Completely Terrible Year
Not everything was terrible.
When this kid met his heroes:
Ollie Kroner / Via Facebook: ollie.kroner
Every time this old man and his dog went out:
Via reddit.com
The first day together for this happy new family:
Via i.imgur.com
When the meter homie came to the rescue:
Via kindnessblog.com
↧
Classic Christmas Movies Reimagined As Low-Budget Knockoffs
You know you’d love to hate-watch each and every one of these.
Most quoted line: "He woke, then sprang up; something just wasn't right. He'd neglected to turn his alarm on last night! Or– three nights ago? What day was today? Two days after Christmas?! He'd slept it away. The Blurch checked his phone. Two voicemails– no, three! 'I'll be better next year,' The Blurch cried, 'You'll see!'"
Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed
Most quoted line: "Sorry, son. I don't really know what's happening to me, but I think I'm becoming Santa. I have to neglect you even more than I was before to go live at the North Pole. This is all my fault somehow. I'm sorry."
Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed
Most quoted line: "Stand clear of the closing doors, please."
Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed
Most quoted line: "Oh no! We're on a plane traveling out of the country, and we have just realized that our son is still at home! I guess it's true what the've all been saying about us: we are bad, bad parents!"
Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed / Thinkstock
↧
13 Tech Things We Tried In 2015 And Recommend
Apps, hacks, and social media accounts that we recommend for 2016.
Each month, the BuzzFeed Life team recommends interesting beauty/craft/ recipe/lifestyle products, tricks, and apps its editors tested out in their own lives. It's always one of my favorite things to read – real, honest endorsements of some small thing that made someone's life a little better.
Monthly product recommendations aren't really what we do here at BuzzFeed Tech, but for the end of the year I asked our team to recommend things that made their lives a little better in 2015 (that's the idea of technology anyway, right?). Things that aren't life changing products or gadgets – perhaps a way of using something that already existed a little differently, or a website that we enjoyed or a social media account that cracks us up.
Here's to making 2016 a little better, in tiny ways.
The Mushroom Identification Forum Facebook group
This has been the year that Facebook groups have completely changed my view on Facebook. I started signing up for weird groups, and all of a sudden, Facebook is this fun awesome place with lots of interesting new people chatting and posting pictures of specific things, and not just a place for my high school friends' baby photos or political rants. Groups have made Facebook fun again for me – something I thought was literally impossible.
Of the weird and wonderful groups I've joined, the Mushroom Identification Forum is by far the best. It's huge for Facebook group standards: about 51,000 members currently. The group is exactly what it sounds like – people post photos of mushrooms they see out in the wild, and ask for help identifying them. I've been incredibly impressed by the deep knowledge some members have for fingering fungii (or "mycology", as the study of mushrooms is known). I had no idea that mushrooms were a ~thing~ people were into as a hobby. I'm a birdwatcher, and I can see how it's pretty similar, and you rack up knowledge pretty fast just by looking out while on a walk in the woods and maybe browsing a few guidebooks. The slightly geeky obsessiveness of amateur mushroom sleuths is very recognizable to me.
I just love seeing these people from all over the country posting a photo of some strange thing they saw while on a hike in Ohio, or growing on a piece of wood in an urban yard of San Francisco. It's a little bit funny, like the kid asking "can I eat it?" but also genuinely sweet and innocent. I've added several friends to the group, and they love it as much as I do.
Perhaps the best use of Facebook is not as place to connect with friends, but a place that when you see some weirdass shroom growing in your yard, you can ask someone "what the hell is this?" –Katie Notopoulos
The @kylizzlesnapchats Instagram account
This Instagram account is the best way to keep track of Kylie Jenner and her rotating satellite of baes. It posts Snapchats from Jenner's account, as well instances where she shows up in Snapchats posted by her friends. If you can't be bothered by Snapchat, it's the best way to follow the saga of casual wealth in Calabasas in doses and from many different angles. It's also a black mirror into The Selfie's next frontier. Whoever runs this account, please call me. You are very industrious and I want to know more about your methods. –Nitasha Tiku
De-Quantifying My Exercise
Above: miserable after a trying to beat my times while jogging.
In theory I love the idea of tracking myself. Seeing my daily behavior at scale is fascinating and I hold out hope that by doing something over and over again and logging it, I'll gain some sort of deep insight into myself and, in turn, ~optimize~ my life. So when I started really getting into running, I immediately started logging all my sweaty miles with the Nike+ app. At first it was brutal and embarrassing, but it quickly became fun and addicting as I got marginally more in shape. I started lightly obsessing over milage and time, often precariously glancing down at my phone during runs to check my progress. I pushed myself to go faster and farther, which, at first seemed great — Nike+, my personal running coach!
But as the months went on it, like so many other trackers/gadgets, became a source of anxiety. The weather turned nice and, instead of focusing on the gorgeous scenery as I ran through New York, I was focused on some arbitrary fitness goal. Any run slower than the day before it was a failure instead of what it really was: a little victory. I also found myself bothered by lots of small little injuries, no doubt because I was doing pushing myself too much on days when I should have taken it easy.
So I stopped. I deleted the app and went out for runs without my phone. It was hard at first and I felt like I'd given up. And then, a week or so in, I started to feel great. I let my mind wander. I focused on listening to my body, rather than relying on an app. I had more time to let my mind wander. Running, this thing that felt like a daily punishment, was almost kind of fun.
Working out regularly is so goddamn hard and basically took me 27 years to do so with any frequency. Doing any kind of exercise is a victory and should be celebrated as such, and anything that gets in the way of that has got to go. –Charlie Warzel
↧
More Pages to Explore .....
