I wish I wrote more letters.

The art of letter-writing is endangered these days, and when you sift through archives of letters written 25, 50, 100 years ago, it seems as though language is elevated, thoughts are better articulated, and emotions are more strongly revealed. When I was 16 years old, a friend and I walked into an abandoned one-room shack in the middle of a field (yes, these things can happen when you live out in the country), and found a stash of curse-word-laced love notes written from one high school girl to her boyfriend, with whom she clearly had a child. My friend kept the love notes, and I bet they’re still tied up with a string in her closet somewhere. For years, my mother wrote letters to a soldier abroad whom she’d never met in real life. She still remembers his name, and wonders where he might be.

I find myself, every month or so, heading over to Letters of Note, an amazing compilation of letters from all walks of life that are at times hilarious, heartbreaking, stocked with wisdom, and mystifying. “To My Old Master,” an 1865 note from an emancipated slave responding to his old owner’s request to come back and work on his farm, is a work of beauty. I can only imagine the pleasure felt by the former slave when he politely requested that to even consider the offer, he would first require compensation of back wages + interest for both his and his wife’s years of servitude, plus a guarantee of a good education for his children. Even Tarantino can’t re-create that catharsis.

There’s a letter from poet Ted Hughes to his son Nick reminding him to embrace his childish self and live with passion, a letter from John Steinbeck assuring his college-aged son that being in love is a particularly beautiful thing, a letter from the creators of South Park describing in all-too-explicit detail to the MPAA what offensive jokes they took out and left in for the South Park movie, and my personal favorite, a letter from a screenwriter to MGM studios, asking for a job by way of describing all of the types of words he likes.

“I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty.”

But maybe my favorite corner of the Internet that’s filled with letters is the one that’s filled with my own. Years ago, I stumbled across FutureMe, a site that lets you write letters to yourself and then schedule delivery for any date in the future. I’ve received probably about 10 letters from myself since I was 15 years old, some sent just three weeks after I wrote them, others sent three years. More recently, I composed a letter in October 2010, two months before I graduated college, and sent it exactly one year into the future, to October 2011. The letter ended as such:

“Congrats on graduating, Alison. I hope you stick it out with that GPA– don’t fuck it up in this last semester. Stay friends with [X], [Y], [Z], and your housemates this year. Don’t let everyone go from college the way you did from high school. Try to keep ties alive, even if you don’t believe they care as much about you as you do them. You’re going to want to have friends to invite to your wedding, after all.

But most of all, I hope you’re kicking ass right now. I hope you’re financially stable, doing something you love, and happily in a relationship or alone, whichever suits you best. See you in a year!”

Try it. See how long you can stand to wait until you read the letter again, and send one off into the Internetsphere to float around for awhile and come back to you with your own reflections. You don’t even have to pay for postage.

Unless you’ve been hiding out in the corner of a windowless room without any Internet connection or friends, you’ve probably heard about the terrifying E4 tornado that struck Moore, OK, this week, pummeling two schools, a hospital, and countless homes such that a birds-eye-view of the place looks like one of my Sim Cities after I released an alien attack.

I always feel a pang of familiarity, however remote, toward those terrible photographs flashing across the news. When I was 8, a tornado ripped through my neighborhood in a giant, swirling green rainy wreck of a storm. The tornado was medium-strength, completely destroying about two dozen homes and damaging 500 more, and luckily producing no casualties — but to this day, I can still recall the stories that later emerged when we all came walking out of our homes, front doors swung wide open, staring at our neighbors in dazed confusion as we surveyed the damage. There was the lady in a nearby neighborhood who hid in the cupboard underneath her stairs as her house crumbled around her. There was my friend Libby who lived up the street, whose home had its second story and attic ripped off in the wind, flooding her entire first floor and taking every personal possession her family ever had. There was Kate, who told me about the entire back porch she saw fly past her living room window in what had to have been one of the more surreal things she’ll ever see in her life.

A street in my neighborhood after the storm.

For years — seriously, years – after the tornado, I was deathly terrified of wind and storms. My ritual whenever one descended on our home was to hide in my bedroom, sheets and comforter actually pulled over my head, with all of the lights on and the radio blasting to drown out the claps of thunder and the whistle of the wind. I would hum or sing loudly and just hover in a ball in my makeshift tent. My bed at the time was in the center of my room; when, several years later, I re-arranged and moved it next to my window, I considered the decision a true feat of courage on my part.

But what I find most interesting about that tornado, and that night, is the sheer amount of detail that’s stuck nestled in my brain, seemingly for good. That evening, my elementary school was hosting a Roller Skate Night in town, and Dad and I were supposed to pick up my friend who lived up the street. Had we followed through with that plan, we would have been on the road in the exact path of the tornado right when it touched ground — but, with the weather as terrible as it was, my parents canned the plan and kept me at home for the night.

There was the game of Stratego that my sister and I were playing in the basement, as the windows started to vibrate and we noticed our playing pieces were falling over without our touch. There was the moment that she and I raced up the stairs to seek comfort from our parents just as they were racing down them to push us underneath a table in our ground-level basement, as far from the window as possible. There was my father, rushing over to put back in the windows when they blew into the room, as the drop ceiling panels started clattering to the floor, and me screaming at him to stay underneath the table, with all of the command that an 8-year-old can muster. There was the noise — the roaring, rushing wind that you had to shout to be heard over. There was the walk through the house afterwards, where every window had blown in, furniture was ruined, and the thick arm of a tree had fallen into my sister’s bedroom, smashing her windows and rendering the place unlivable for a number of weeks. I can still remember my mother telling me that she knew something was wrong when her ears started popping. I can still see her eyes, wide and worried, as she stopped Claire and I mid-way up the stairs and told us to turn back around and march right back down to the basement.

How have so many banal details — Roller Skate Night, that game of Stratego, Dad’s foolhardy decision to run over to the windows — stayed cozied away in my brain? Without even really realizing it, my mind just stored away all of the minutiae associated with what turned out to be a watershed event in my young life. I can still draw up the image in my mind and feel the same sense of panic I felt in those seconds when it became plainly obvious that the tornado was making its way right past our house, and we were at the mercy of its path.

Nobody in Moore, or Joplin, or anywhere that’s victim to a storm like that, will ever forget the banal details of every second leading up to the moment the tornado touched, or in the moments after. My heart goes out to Moore, and the families who are searching for children in the rubble of an elementary school. I can only feel a fraction of their pain, and I hope they all can find tiny moments down the road that are still worth holding on to.

Starting Fresh.

I’ve thought a lot about what to do with this space in 2013, considering that, for the most part, my posts dropped off after I completed the Tough Mudder in December 2012. In so many, many ways, 2012 was a watershed year for me. It began with that piece of paper I stuck on my fridge titled “Goals for 2012” — Give more. Smile more. Forgive more quickly. That list, whose red and blue Sharpie words have nearly faded to grayscale, still hangs in my kitchen, but it means less now because for the most part, I’ve integrated all of those reminders into my daily existence. I don’t need to see them written down to remember to eat good food, to sleep 8 hours a night, to cook for friends, to read more, to work hard but know when to take a break.

In 2012, I broke out of a whole host of shells I’d been keeping myself in. I set, and exceeded, goals for myself. I let go of unhealthy relationships and forged new, wonderful ones. I started moving around every day, working up a sweat, and I started thinking harder about what I consume. I paid closer attention to the people who matter the most, and I paid closer attention to my own needs. I treated myself to a number of adventures, I watched the first of my college friends get married, and I traveled solo just for fun.

So where does that put me in 2013? I’ve been less inclined to write in here because rather than revelation after revelation, I’m instead simply deepening the roots I started putting in the ground last year. The craving for adventures continues unabated — in 2013 so far, I’ve Sweetlifed, skied, road-tripped, scavenger hunted, and half-marathoned. Later this summer, I’ll visit Charleston, go camping and white water rafting, see Paul McCartney in concert, spend a long weekend at the beach with a whole host of friends, and travel solo to San Francisco for a week of exploring – all before moving up to Cambridge, MA in the fall to start work on my Masters degree! I can’t begin to express how lucky I feel to be in this special time of life right now: that harried, busy, 20-something existence that’s all whirlwinds with friends, quiet nights when I want them, and an overstuffed calendar of pure awesome.

Simply put, the good times just keep on rolling.

Which brings me, in this ridiculously roundabout way, to where I’ve decided to take this blog. Kaleshot started out just as a record of my gym foibles and attempts at Zumba. To be sure, there will continue to be more of that, and in fact, I’m inspired to go try out some new variations of exercise just so I can report back.

But I also plan to spend more time on what I’m beginning to realize is my evolving philosophy — where I place my values, why I do what I do, what kind of person I want to be and am becoming. To that end, I’ve created 4 new concrete categories in which every post will be stored: Philosophy, Food, Fitness, and Fun. (And um, General, because WordPress won’t seem to let me delete that one.)

Regarding the first category, I am, I’ve realized, actively, in-this-very-moment in the midst of a process of immense self-discovery that began with that list on my fridge and has continued to mature and strengthen in the year and a half since. And I know what I’m shooting for: a good life, a big life, a life of peace and joy, a life of success and motivation, and a life of laughter and simplicity. How I get there is where this story starts.