It appears that my little exposé on the inimitable Prof. Callaos has caused a significant jump in this blog’s daily readership. So, to the two or three hundred of you who have been directed to this page today via Google, um…hi. Come here…often?
Now that we’ve dispensed with the formalities, I’m going to do something obnoxious (for the record, meeting me in real life follows basically this same pattern). In particular, I’m going to ask you for money.
Lynn Maxwell, a good friend of mine and a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at Emory University is running the Mayor’s Midnight Sun Marathon in Anchorage, Alaska, to benefit the The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. She’s committed to raising $4,350, and although her fundraising letters have been out for almost a month now, she’s only 63% of the way there.
When I first sat down to write this blog entry, I figured I’d make a list of everyone I’ve known who’s died from cancer and work the names into an eloquent personal appeal for you to hold off on buying those wireless extension chords and kick the money Lynn’s way instead. Ater I started writing down names, I realized that this strategy wasn’t going to work. There are just too damned many people. Friends, grandparents, family members…it would be bad enough if the list stopped there. But it doesn’t. It drags on and on to encompass people’s wives, their children, their mothers and fathers, their aunts and uncles, their sisters and brothers, their high school sweethearts. The list breaks up marriages, it sours retirements, it transforms childhoods, and it ruins careers. There is no class of person it does not touch, no facet of human existence it fails to reach. It cannot be encompassed or even approximated in a single, hasty blog entry. I can’t make a unique, moving appeal for your money for the same reason people standing in Trafalgar Square can’t see England. The problem is just too much bigger than that: anything I try would seem trite and pathetic.
So, instead, I’m just asking. Lynn’s making the trek all the way from Georgia to Alaska so that she can dodge moose and bears for 26 miles and 385 yards in the middle of summer. She’s spending months of her life literally running herself ragged in training when she ought to be reading Chaucer or writing about misogynism in 17th century poetry. The very least the rest of us can do is make sure she meets her fundraising goal.
You can read Lynn’s blog about her journey from couch potato to lean, mean, running machine (if you’re squeamish, feel free to skip the part about bleeding nipples), or you can just jump directly to her donation page. Go give her money.
If it keeps even one more person off the list, isn’t it worth it?
