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Berlin marathon training, day 113. Rest day.

I’m trying to choose which color to paint my nails. It’s a difficult decision. Bright green or pearly beige?

We’re going to the wedding of our closest friends here. This puts me in a very strange mood. On the one hand, I’m excited for them, they’re a great couple, and they’ve wanted to get married for a quite a while now but couldn’t, long story.

On the other hand, all these weddings this year make me wonder if it’s time for me to finally grow up. You see I just do what pleases me, sometimes I’m rather selfish and immature.

I’m a trained physician but don’t practice. I did a bit of clinical work, mostly because I loved being a detective, figuring out what the patient’s problem was. Then I got bored and moved into research, looking for novel HIV therapies. Lab work was exciting — for a while. Now, I’m working as an UX designer, developing e-learning programs for medical education. I love, love, love my job now. But mostly because I get to learn something new, and do really cool stuff. Not because I’m doing something worthy for society. Maybe I should stop being such a child, make some adult decisions about work, relationships, family.

Let’s not even mention all the time I spend running and blogging… Anyone else struggling with balance?

Anyway, today I’m still a child, gonna go for the bright green.

Jealousy vs envy

Since I busted the knee I’ve had a hard time seeing people run outdoors, on the treadmill at the gym, or even sometimes here on tumblr.

At first, I was immensely jealous of the other runners. Let’s see what wikipedia has to say about jealousy: 

Jealousy is an emotion and typically refers to the negative thoughts and feelings of insecurity, fear, and anxiety over an anticipated loss of something that the person values. Jealousy often consists of a combination of presenting emotions such as anger, resentment, inadequacy, helplessness and disgust.

Pretty much on spot, except for the disgust maybe. Lately however, I’ve been mostly sad or envious when I see someone running. Again wikipedia is quite accurate with its description of envy:

Envy (also called invidiousness) is best defined as a resentful emotion that “occurs when a person lacks another’s (perceived) superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it.”

The last part however, about wishing others didn’t have what I can’t have doesn’t apply. I’d rather go with the benign version described below:

Psychologists have recently suggested that there may be two types of envy: malicious envy and benign envy - benign envy being proposed as a type of positive motivational force.

Today, I saw someone running home from the bakery with fresh rolls and I thought: “Awesome, I want to do that too, I’m GOING to do that too — soon.”