how is it that, not a hour after putting away the groceries, I open the fridge in that "stare into the fridge and imagine a snack into existence" type of stare... as if there would magically be something in there that I hadn't seen or put in there only an hour ago. Is it my wishful thinking, or crappy memory that invents the improbable pre-prepared surprise snack?
I got a card in the mail today... not a postcard, the single-fold kind... a card from my credit union. Now this is no regular sort of credit union for me, since it's not even in Michigan - but it's an account that I've left open (with a balance of $32) for the past 10-12 years. I had assumed for years that they would assume the account to be abandoned, and would surrender it to the state. At least, that's what Dad always said would happen (I forget the word he used, but he's a retired accountant, and there's a special accounting/banking word describing the surrender of abandoned accounts).
(A week or so ago while I was in town, I decided that, since credit unions are a cooperative community venture, the cost of sending me all those statements all those years was really just draining the community coffer, and not giving any opportunity to provide loans to others. So, I walked into the branch, wrote a check, and transferred some money into that account.)
... so I pick up my mail, accumulated over the past few weeks, and in among the bills and the junk mail is a card. And that card, hand-written I might add, is essentially a thank-you note for making a deposit: "Thank you for your support, members like you are critical to the success of the credit union!"
If that's not a little creepy, I don't know... maybe I'm just not used to getting personal notes from my financial institutions...
For some reason, I forgot, then remembered, that the last Friday of each month is the customary Critical Mass ride day. Being in ChicagoLand, I figured there'd be a Chicago Critical Mass (CCM) ride downtown, and there was. Of course, how is it that I never picked up on the fact that there's a ride in Ann Arbor too?
Aaannnyway... so I figure I have time on my hands and haven't seen Millenium Park yet, so I grab my bike and sundries and ride on into town. Somehow, someway, the City of Chicago has managed to do some good things about improving life for cyclists - bike lanes on major streets, indoor downtown parking (with showers and lockers and a mechanic on site!), etc. Shameless plug: Chicagoland Bicycling Federation puts out a really good map (for about $5-7) with street conditions/bike lanes indicated, going from downtown, out 40-50 from the lake, north and south.
So I ride into town, see the Park, and The Bean (and other pic) which, depending on your opinion of public art, is either really interesting, or it's a "hunh?" moment. The bridge is pretty nifty too:
There was a weird ground-level fog coming off the lake, but with bright sunshine, and so the effect was pretty interesting with the sunlight bouncing off the windows into the fog - almost like a daytime searchlight:
And then I continue to hang out downtown in The Big City, reading in the parks, walking around, stopping at the Chicago Public Library Harold Washington Library Center to check out the beautiful, red granite, mega-huge library. (if we, as a people or society, are going to build monuments to celebrate or preserve a thing, a library is a pretty damn good choice). It's a really great building (in my opinion), and it you're ever downtown Chicago, consider driving or walking by. Hell, why not go in? It's awfully nifty on the inside as well.
So then comes time for the CCM ride and I show up at Daley Plaza around 5:30. People start trickling in, and keep trickling, people who know each other greeting each other, people showing up on wacky bikes kinda like thisone, young people, old people, every kind you can think of. And so sometime around 6:00, there's a collective rustling and jostling, cyclists start riding out around the plaza in a loop until everyone is out of the plaza and on the street, and then it heads off on the route.
It's a super-slow speed ride so that everyone can keep up and stayed bunched up ("massed up" in masser-speak). Though the premise - taking over whole lanes of pavement as form of "we are here" activism - can be seen as antagonistic, it's really quite friendly. Obviously, there are some motorists who were aggravated when this group of 1000+ (yes, that's thousands) cyclists all going the same route blocked up traffic while the whole group passed, but on the whole, I saw a lot of smiles "out there" on the sidewalks and on coming and stopped traffic.
It seemed like the group got larger and large as the ride progressed. Every time I looked, I was amazed at how many people there were. And when the ride stopped every now and then to keep from stretching out too far, I took some pictures. In the two pics below (click for larger versions), the first one is as I'm riding along, approaching a stopping point. All those people up on the bridge are cyclists. I get up to the group, turn around, and take another picture. I really can't tell how far it went back, but it was at least 6-8 blocks. You tell me - how many people are there? Gotta be at least a thousand.
As things happen in my day and I wonder if I have anything to say about them (what with this whole new blogging adventure and such) I've been having a hard time trying to come to a good answer to the questions of: How much detail is too much detail? When does personal get too personal? Should I worry about people's feelings and assume that I have to write neutrally in order to please all of the people all of the time? How to avoid revealing something about someone else that they wouldn't want to be public? Do I need to worry about a future employer, or my parents, or the FBI or NSA or Customs & Border Protection, or whoever... reading this and it having real-world-I'm-not-kidding-you-this-is-really-serious consequences? Over just a blog?
Well, I don't want you, gentle reader, to be bored out of your mind with boring, impersonal, sterile crap, either. I mean, we all want to know what's going on, right? Gossip is... fun, right? That's kind of the whole point - if you didn't want to hear the latest what's-what, you would have never clicked your way here. If I just wrote about Xbox game reviews or decried the latest offensive thing that an extreme socialist or extreme fascist politician had done, well, there's plenty of blogs about that stuff. So as a matter of administrative ground rules:
[WARNING: boring impersonal sterile crap ahead]
here's what I'm thinking about what I'll say and not say:
- I am gonna talk about people. We live in a world full of people and there's no way to avoid it. If you are a person, I might even talk about you.
- I probably WILL use people's first names, but WILL NOT use last names. Unless of course, you're a public person (have been written up in newspaper or have been on TV, or hold government office). If you have published your own first and last name online, then you are considered public.
- If you see your name in print and are super-creeped out by it, let me know and I will invent a nickname and replace your name with it (you don't get any input on nickname selection though)
- No addresses, email or otherwise, or geographically identifying information more specific than a city. Photos won't be connectable to the addresses of people's homes.
- Children's names will be changed. Pets (a.k.a. Companion Animals) get no such anonymity.
[PHEWW - end of boring crap]
I left Champaign-Urbana yesterday to go hang out at Laura and Juan's house in ChicagoLand before Allison's wedding.
LittleBoyBuddha (LBB) and MonsterGirl (MG)
are growing up pretty quick these days... I had one of those "oh, crap... they've been actually listening all this time - I better watch my language" moments yesterday. We went to the park to play, and made our way over to the lants and flowers, and MonsterGirl was looking at some purple flowers, with a dandelion in her hand, looking back and forth. So I'm thinking I'll share some color information with her, saying "this one's a purple flower... sorry, I don't know the taxonmy of this particular genus and species" and she immediately says "puh-puh"
whoooah... did she just learn a word? Right there in front of me? It was a pretty remarkable moment. Then of course, in telling the story, I learn that she has known purple and blue for a little while, so my bubble got a little popped there. It was a cool moment while it lasted though.
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One thing I for sure miss about the Illinois farmland is the wide open skies... In Michigan, the only sky that you can see is the part right above your head. On the Prairie, it's all around you.
(Curses to stupid Mac software - crappy iPhoto can't stitch photos together for the panoramic view, but there's link to the full-sized photos)
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Thanks a whole bunch to Matthew and Sandra (and the dogs and cats) for putting me up... and of course, for putting up with me too. I had a way fun-time Visiting On the Prairie. I swear, the weather was frickin' fantabulous, went on some good rides, and I set some "personal bests" for my ability to lounge around and be a lump on the couch.
Chambana - the more it changes, the more it stays the same. Luckily, they haven't gotten rid of some of my favorite "plop art" over by the School of Art and Design:
Oh yeah, and my heinous sandal sunburn is getting much better (I know how concerned you were for me). I'm glad that I can put on shoes and socks without having to think about it first.
Being back on campus at UIUC, I figured I would take a stroll through the Met. & Mining Building (now known as the Materials Science and Engineering Building) just for old times. But as I'm walking through the old building and it's empty halls (since school is out of session for the summer) I wonder "what exactly am I expecting here?" I mean really... that I'm going to be magically transported through some fantastical Nostalgia Portal and I will be showered with rose petals as trumpets signal my return?
There's no past. It happened, it's over, those moments will never occur again. There is only forward, in whatever way that may manifest. Somehow along the way I fear that I have come to expect that I can pause/rewind/fast forward/skip along time like some sort of cosmic TiVO and that I can do everything. Maybe that's why I'm always late to things - I expect to be able to pause the rest of the world while I do just one more thing "it'll jus take a second, really, I swear". And just because I can imagine or relive a moment in my head doesn't make it happen, and in the meantime, the world has continued to turn while my imagining was in progress. From the book club selection last month (Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore) there's a passage when the Johnnie Walker character is harvesting the souls of the cats Nakata was looking for:
" 'You have to look!' Johnnie Walker commaded. '... Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact things will be even worse the next time your eyes open. ... Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.' "
There's a quotation out there that I can't find a source to attribute it to:
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It annoys the pig and wastes your time"
There's a variation I like that goes: Never try to teach other people why you love what you love - it annoys the others and wastes your time. If people get it, they get it. If they don't, they probably weren't open to the idea in the first place, and trying to explain it to them might not be that useful. ESPECIALLY when it comes to things that are personal in some way and that one has emotional involvement in. Of course, this leads into the topic of different understandings of the nature of romantic love, but I'll save that for another time.
While spending a few minutes looking for the originator of the quote, I came across a kind of odd/funny parody quote about raising male children.
It's been almost exactly a week since arriving here in C-U, and it wasn't until today that I really felt wound down. The exact moment? Riding onto/through campus, taking a left onto Green St. past Loomis Lab, when I noticed that I was more relaxed than when I arrived a week ago. Of course I've been "on vacation" now for more than a week, but I guess it's kind of like the European version of vacation - you get 6 weeks of vacation from work (2 weeks to wind down, then 4 weeks to spend going somewhere). There's an oblique reference to be made here - to Filip Meirhaeghe (Belgian mountain biking pro who retired/was booted from the sport after testing positive for EPO in 2005) and something he said in Off Road To Athens
"It's not just the training, its... resting is such a big part of it. And... resting doesn't mean walking around in a little village and sitting on a terrace drinking a coffee - that's not resting. Resting is laying in bed. If possible with your legs up. That's resting. Falling asleep. A National coach once said to me: 'as long as you are racing, there is nothing else that matters, besides racing', which is really harsh, but this is practically how it is... the level is so high that there is nothing else that can matter... it is is as simple as that."
Now I'm not saying that Filip's drive to win justified the EPO, but he makes a good point about both the resting and the single-minded focus being necessary for success at the highest levels. Interesting pseudo-contrarian rant about the doping in cycling - sure, everyone has to put a roof over their head and food on the table, and I'm sure that the pressure is huge, but when you roll the dice sticking a needle in your arm, you take your chances. If you get found out later and either get fired or get cancer, those are the risks you take. Own up to 'em.
So I went to go hang out in the fascinating town of Kankakee this weekend (town slogan: "we're not dead yet, even though it sure looks that way when you're driving to Cobb Park") for a bike race, the Cobb Park Criterium. Some friends of friends on the C-U Racing team were ridin' in the green & black and did pretty well. Jess done got herself 2nd place in the Women's Open category, sprintin' at the finish line here.
Here's Little Dan P. movin' up through the pack...
He started off in the back (bad start, or super-secret strategy?), but fear not - he gnawed on the pack for most of the 45 minutes, stayed out of the bizarre mid-race crash in the straightaway near the start/finish, pulled the pack for the last few laps, and took 2nd in the Cat 4/5 race.
And the last meaningful decent photo I have here - Luke lookin' Mean and Green midway through the race, with a strong ride as well.
Me? I got a pretty vicious sandal-tan sunburn,
... but that's about all that I have to say for myself. Congrats to the C-U Racing folks.
Thanks to Fight Club (and to the Dust Brothers) for the quotables...
You are not your bank account
You are not your clothes you wear
You are not your contents of your wallet
You are not your bowel cancer
You are not your grande latte
You are not your the car you drive
You are not your fucking khakis...
You have to realize that someday you will die.
Until you know that, you are useless.
I say: let me never be complete.
I say: let me never be content
I say: deliver me from Swedish furniture
I say: deliver me from clever Art.
I say: evolve, and let the chips fall where they may.
This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time....
In Champaign-Urbana, driving through this town and the surrounding flatlands, little towns, etc. the dominant activity is agriculture. The town itself has purpose of its own, it has purpose when the University is active, but I'm reminded of comments others have made whenever I talk about Grad School - "would you be comfortable with the lifestyle change (ostensibly from a 'human adult' lifestyle to a 'student' lifestyle)?" "do you think you could go back to living in a town like C-U as a student?" And earlier today, what I saw through my Michigan Eyes as I drove through town was a small town, and sleepy. How interesting could it possibly be? Could I live here? But of course, lots of people live here, and live happy, healthy, and full lives here.
The remark I hate when I hear people say it: "over there - it's a pretty rough neighborhood". No matter what the neighborhood is, black/white, rich/poor, city/countryside whatever, there are people that are born, live, go to work, raise families, just like everybody else. It's not a radioactive fallout zone and chances are that you aren't going to get gang-raped by roving bands of Toxic Avenger mutants.
Sidebar: The other remark I detest - "well, all I know is that someone should do something". Oh yeah, well if you are so smart to know this, then who should do what? If you don't know or are too much of a pussy to say, then just keep yer trap shut so that you don't annoy the people who are doing something about it. I could rant on and on about this because of how much I detest it, but I'll spare you.
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And then, hours later, after getting a little bit lost in my own mind, looking across the street at shop windows and such, it's a own just like any other, and I can't tell the difference. I begin to wonder again about my adaptability, which I curse somedays - being able to adapt to most situations. In some ways, it means that I don't know where I am. It's not so bad as what the New Pope (like New Coke) Ratzinger/Benedict would decry as the Satanic Evils of moral relativism, but there are times when I feel like I'm drifting on the wind far too much. Alas, another of the big ole questions I ask myself that no one can answer but me.
It seems that all of a sudden (in the past year or two) that I have started to feel "age". Not that I can feel myself aging, but maybe that I have been ignoring the passing of time. The the time was just going on and I was the proverbial grasshopper, and now I'm wondering how quickly winter will set in. It's not particularly one thing or anoher, rather a combination of things. Can I list a few? Sure:
- My hairline is receeding in the only way I can imagine I wouldn't like it to. (gosh, I'm so vain) That, and finding grey hairs, though those don't bother me as much as anticipating my future comb-over.
- I no longer have the metabolism of a 15-year-old. Eating cheetos, watching TV and sitting around has taken its toll. That, and my cardio-pulmonary capacity pretty much sucks. Getting on the bike to go on a club ride, sucking wind and getting dropped is a pretty clear indicator.
- Realizing that at the end of any 5-year plan, not matter what the plan is, I will be 37 years old. Not the end of the world, but you only get so many 5-year plans, eh? And the 5-year plan that starts then will be a plan that gets me through to 42... a not-so-spring-chicken age.
- Things just aren't coming to me as easily as they used to. There's more of a struggle. Either that, or maybe I've gotten too dumb, soft, fat, and lazy that when it gets tough I'm more of a pussy and don't kill myself to do whatever it is (since "whatever it takes, whatever the cost" used to be a part of my worldview. Maybe I was just a poser all that time.) Hell, that fact that I just used the phrase "all that time" referring to an unrecoverable past sure is telling...
- oh yeah, and the dude who just sat down next to me at the window in the cafe, during the "is this seat taken... nice weather we're having..." pro-forma smalltalk asked "are you a grad student or professor?". Fucking shit. I'm definitely an old fogey now. I could ignore the "sir" I get at restaurants, 'cause that's part of their job. But this... why did you have to be so cruel? Damn you... damn you all to hell.
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If only we could all live in Niceville... too bad it's so many miles away
For some strange reason, I find Team Evil to just be entertaining as all git-'em-out. Just something about it, I guess. Anyhoo, since I'm all wirelessed up these days, I browse while sitting on the porcelain throne, which then reminds me of the Team Evil Chort Report. I'll spare you the details here, but fer cryin' out loud, this is ridiculous... I should have courtesy-flushed earlier (waves hand in front of nose)
A little sumpthin' that comes in handy every now and then - "There's a time for thinking and a time for doing... and now's no time for thinkin' "
- John Candy (I think, by way of Wacky Tom)
I was trying to get some good action photos of Lucy while she was running and runningandrunningandrunning, playing with the tennis ball, but it kind of looks like she's projectile vomiting...
And then of course comes the slobbering.
I'm at Matthew and Sandra's house this week (and next week too, if you didn't know) and they've got this soap which, well... I'm actually afraid of. It's not that it's menacing, it's just really creepy. (OK, side note here: I'm at a cafe - Sandra and I just left meeting Matthew for lunch - and I got up to go to the bathroom, and Sandra was totally reading the first two sentences of this. This of course now means that when I re-read itI notice how totally boring it is. So I'm on a crusade now, "punching up the dialog" now that someone read the boring part. Of course, since a blog is intended to be read anyway, what was I thinking, writing something boring? Who wants to read that?
So yeah, there's this soap made by some ultra-religious folks that is purported to contain "prayer" and "eloptic energy". Two REALLY funny things about the soap - the reason why I couldn't stand using it was because it smelled way too much like Dawn/Palmolive/dish soap. I'm willing to bet that's what it actually is. The other thing is that, even with all of the claims about essentially spiritual homeopathy, there's another group of religious folks that denounce them as minions of Satan. Fer cryin' out loud, somebody please get the Satanic minions straight here...
Anyway, I'll help to oppose the Crazy Water People for their laughability and danger they may pose to well-intentioned, but unsuspecting consumers. I for one am glad that the FDA is at least doing something . As for me, I'm going with the Tea Tree stuff, because that stuff smells great. Nothing like what you would expect, but it's definitely something I like.
Today (in case you missed it) was a thing known as the Ride of Silence. Alas, in this neighborhood, with lightning flickering on the horizon right when we were about to set out at 7:00, the safer choice turned out to be the wiser choice as wicked (dare I say heinous?) storms passed through town. Besides, who wants to suddenly be a bad news story? ”Today in an ironic twist of fate, 6 cyclists in Champaign-Urbana were killed while riding through town in an annual ride intended as a memorial to cyclists injured or killed on the road” Not us, that’s for sure. Next year though, a little cooperation from the weather would be good. I hope it went well for the folks in Ann Arbor on the first annual ride for AABTS / AAVC.
For all you cyclists out there who might be interested in joining with others to remember fallen cyclists, maybe engage in some non-confrontational & low-impact cycling activism, have a look at rideofsilence.org. Ask around your local community, spread the word, participate. (If there’s no local ride in your town maybe even start your own?)
For all you motorists out there - please remember: Cyclists Are Everywhere. The cyclists don’t mean you any harm or ill will just like you probably don’t mean them any harm or ill will. Tempers can flare, but let’s all Try To Get Along. If the road is narrow, we’ll gladly move over if we can. Please don’t run us over. Thanks.
'Tis a trifle, a little thing this thing here. A spot for the blahblahblah and the yaddayaddayadda. And of course, here I am sitting in front of it and I have Blank Page Syndrome. What the hell fascinating things do I have to say?
(ok, so technically, I wrote this a few days ago, but bear with me... )
Here goes: I sit here in the Panera Bread ("NEW! from Panera! Suck you in with Free Wifi to then sell you Really Quite Average Breadstuffs(tm)") in the place of my birth (Evanston), I'm one of those pinheads in the window sitting behind a laptop chuckling to himself - buying one cup of coffee and then parking his ass for hours, not buying anything else. But the fascination of the moment is: The Parking Spot Half-Life. You know the phenomenon... in a city where parking is a premium, and people will circle a block 4 times hoping a spot opens up, as soon as one does, they snag it, recklessly diving at it like famine-starved tribesmen mobbing a UN relief truck full of rice. So anyway, that parking spot is unoccupied for what... 5 seconds? Great for city revenue, and immensely entertaining to watch. Of course, I'm a little disingenuous here, because more often I'm the guy snagging the spot than I am the guy jabbering about the guy snagging the spot.
So the whole point of this is: what if there were a metric that the city parking authority or downtown development association had to measure this? Sort of a parking space duty cycle. Or fill factor. Or occupancy rate. You'd have to normalize it against day of the week, time of day, and season or holiday and compare it to foot traffic, but you could measure something like that, I'd think. And I would think that someone in local business would want to know something like this, right? enh.
It's not like I've thought of this often or anything, but living in Ann Arbor, parking is pretty scarce when students are in town. I like to think that I have perfected the the Ann Arbor Parking Manoeuvre. Imagine you have accepted that you are in a part of town and time of day when the half-life of an available spot is non-existent. And that you really want a spot. A spot opens up across the street (going the other direction)... what do you do? You duck into an alley, pull the 3-point turn, and take the spot, that's what you do. No alley? Is the road wide enough to pull a U-turn (legal or otherwise)? And I should mention... you get bonus points if you speed up to pull into the alley, so that you block oncoming traffic with your 3-point turn, preventing some other poor sap going the other direction from getting that spot. Now THAT's a competitive spirit when it comes to parking. We won't even get into "Parking Spaces of Uncertain Permissibility" (the spots that are defined NO parking certain hours, but don't say anything about the other hours).
