No Cash Prizes?

Today I ran in the St. Nick's Six! That's the short name for a 6km run / 3km walk that is connected to the St. Joseph school and church a couple blocks from my house.

The weather was better than expected, and the field of competition was fierce. I had a little electric chip thing attached to a shoelace that recorded my time. I've never been in a race that has that, so that was kind of cool. I got a free shirt, also kind of cool. And I ran and I ran and I ran and then I was done and I felt kind of good because I didn't push myself toooo hard and my calf muscles hurt, but that's about it. Also there was hot chocolate.

The sheet of paper said that I came 7th of all the males aged 20-24. Apparently, there were exactly 7 males aged 20-24 racing. 6th place was about 5 minutes ahead of me. My finishing time was listed as 35.07, which I worked out is about 9m25s per mile. So, you know, pretty good for a guy who ran on Thursday to prepare and before that hadn't gone on a run since 1.5 miles in the summer of 2010.

Yeeeeah... running... it's so not my favorite.

I had a few friends running also. Gary came 4th of the 7 males aged 20-24 with a time of 27ish minutes. He set this whole thing up for us, including registering us all. I was pleased to see my name was spelled correctly after Monika G****** went up to the registration board and said, "Gary, did you put me down as Monika G-Polish?" I maintain that this worked out in Monika's favor because she decided to do the 3k walk at the last minute and accidentally came first among the females aged 25-29 (Monika will turn 25 in 2013). Neil won 2nd in his group and got a hat. Tim got a $5 DQ giftcard for 3rd place in his. What was first prize? Cash? We will never know because Monika was too embarrassed to claim her prize that she didn't earn.

Put a Price on Sleep

First of all, welcome to my new house:

Yeah, front porch... and you can't see it, but there's a swing on the right. It's pretty cool. It swings and whatnot. Two people could sit on it. It generally has a pretty good view. You can see storm clouds rolling in from the West. The view right now, however, is mostly taken up by this:

There's a construction site down the way. It's full of disgruntled workers that seem to be in a permanent state of semi-on-strike. That's where they wake up super early in the morning and make tons of noise, but still manage to find time to stand on the side of the road with signs that don't explain what they want. While your "Honk for worker's rights!" sign appeals to my desire for a daily recognizable but abstract sense of justice, I don't feel strongly about your cause because I don't know what it is.

So, instead of supporting the workers who make lots of noise really early in the morning despite their confusingly intermittent strike, I decided to fix the main problem with the house. The problem is as follows: three bedrooms, three graduate students, but one of the bedrooms is in the back of the house, which is my room and was probably part of an addition at some point in the house's 105-year history. There are two doors to my bedroom. One is through another bedroom and the other is to the outside (and leads out onto a covered back-patio area). The problem is with the door to the outside. It led out to the patio, but with a two-and-a-half foot drop.

Woodworking project:

Win. Awesome. End of story.

Well, not quite end of story. I enlisted some help from Tyler. So, he deserves proper credit for helping with fixing the stairs into the concrete and reducing wobbliness. Also, I should varnish or paint it.

Some things money can rent

Sort of dull account of moving (not too long though...)

So, I moved. It was a good move. I mean, it was a good decision. Also, the move went okay. I got a lot of help from my new roommate and his family, who moved him here from Chatham, Ontario in a mini-van that they offered to use to assist me with my move. I'd say about half of my possessions made it into or onto that van during the move. So, I couldn't be more grateful.

A lot of my friends here were very busy around moving time. So, I did most of the work on my own. I was somehow surprised at how long it takes to move yourself. I've always had at least one person helping with any moving I've done in the past and it makes the whole process more than twice as hard and frustrating to do it on your own.

When the move was done, my room at the new place looked like this:

It was remarkable that I even managed to fit all that in the room. While it is a good-sized room, this amounts to 80-90% of my non-kitchen possessions from my old apartment. It was weird trying to figure out how to get a 1-bedroom-apartment lifestyle into a shared house.

Yes, that's right! A house. I live in a house. With the wonderful difference in housing markets from Chicago to South, it is possible to live in not-an-apartment. I haven't lived in a house since 2005 and it feels good. Hopefully, I won't have to move next summer.

I sold my old twin bed to new-roommate Gary and got this new (new-to-me) queen size from the St. Vincent DePaul Society warehouse, which is where much of my furniture has been purchased. Then, I got the sweet gray-scale, low quality, mostly polyester, Meijer bedding:

There are pillowcases that match the comforter, but extra pillows for aesthetic purposes... not really a high priority.

So, for now, Gary, Semyon and I live in this 3-bedroom house. In British terms, it's a bungalow, I believe, but it has a basement. So, I don't know what to call that, but it works out pretty well. There's a lot more space to do things like wood-working side projects and whatnot. Also, more place for people to stay if anyone should desire to visit.

More on the latest wood-working project soon...

Another Skyku

Another skyku that I wrote while working on papers, posted to facebook, and forgot to add to the blog:


Haiku conventions
were easy when I flew high
up in the DON'T RHYME


Also, for those who are still confused, skykus are haikus that are written up in the blue sky. Technically, today's posting doesn't count. Maybe I need another word for haikus written while in the hurt locker. Suggestions? (It will happen again.)

Squirrels are people too

Oh wait, no they're not.

After some harrowing biking adventures, I tried to keep myself biking this week, which began with a ride to campus on Tuesday. A squirrel crossed my path as I was building speed after an intersection and another squirrel, delirious with the thrill of the chase, followed behind on a somewhat frantic path that led him into my wheel.

Don't worry. The squirrel was fine.

Well, I believe he was fine.

I assume he was fine and I assume he was a he. Who ever heard of a female squirrel chasing another squirrel in the springtime?

Seriously, don't ask me. I don't know much about squirrels, but this particular squirrel hit my wheel or tire and scampered around before he reached safety. He seemed a little disoriented, but it's rather hard to tell with squirrels.

I worried about squirrel and felt personally responsible for his pain and possible brain damage. I suspect that he had brain damage, but according to Bill Cosby's definition of brain damage, he already proved to have brain damage by being stupid enough to run into my tire. I can't blame him, though. If I was a squirrel and my significant other wouldn't frolic with me during the festivities of springtime, instead running across the street and leading me into traffic, I might be distracted enough to end up with my head under a tire, or might seek it out.

Still, the squirrel deserves another moment or two. If he scampered off to die quietly of brain hemorrhaging, I wouldn't want my last comment to be my suspicion of his suicidal behavior. On the other hand, I have spent more time thinking about this squirrel than I have about any other, except maybe "Fat Keith" from the park outside the British Museum, or perhaps Eddie Izzard's "Did I leave the gas on?" makeup-wearing squirrels from Dress to Kill. In case you were wondering, I wasn't dressed to kill. I was dressed to play basketball. I didn't even play very well. Legs still tired maybe.

To conclude, I suppose squirrels always think they're choosing cake when they run out into the street during their seasonal frolic. If the choice between cake or death arises, is a squirrel capable of telling the difference? The cake is a lie.

Harrowing Tale of Adventure

Sorry for the long post everyone. I tried to use weird language to make it quick and punchy, but it probably gets kind of boring. Anyway, I felt the need to get this written down.


I pushed my legs harder than I can ever remember and knew that I had to keep going, but felt a distinct inclination to find out where the nearest motel was and lament the fact that it wasn't right here, right now.
Wait... let me go back.
The nine of us set off at 6:35am with high expectations and high energy.
Wait... further back.
I had class for a week from 9 to 5 and didn't feel like biking much after that even though I was biking to and from campus for class.
Maybe too far back...
So, I got sick and didn't train until the Wednesday. We started off on the Friday morning.
Maybe I had it right before...
The Friday.
Tyler and I got up at 4:45am. I don't remember sleeping that night. Must have dozed but never really slept.
Loaded the bikes onto a little bikerack on the back of the Civic, known to some as 'Zippy'; drove to Derrick's place. Everyone met there, trickling in sometime around 6am. We were supposed to leave by 6. Slow start expected. Ah well.
Ah yes. So, the nine of us set off at 6:35am with expectations and high energy. There was some rain predicted, but we hoped to beat it.
Friday's Plan.
Leave at 6am. Bike from Chicago to Milwaukee. 100 miles at about 80% bike trails. Average speed 12mph. With a few breaks and a few unforeseen problems this should take between 10 and 12 hours. Realistically, 12 hours is probably about right. So, we plan to get into Milwaukee between 6 and 7pm.
What actually happened.
Nine guys around the ages of 23 or 24 set off together. After about 45 minutes, I got a flat tire and it started raining. Jordan was worried about a tear in my tire. No bike stores were open yet. We replaced the tube and strapped some of the old tube to the outside of the tear to protect it from miscellaneous puncturing variables. The piece of old tube was strapped on with duct tape wrapped around the wheel. To stop the tape from rubbing on my back breaks, we took the back breakpads off.
Skip a few things.
After about 20 miles of driving with some duct tape strapped around my tire and only one set of breaks, we had another flat and then stopped in at a bike store, which was filled with extremely helpful employees that also managed to fit in some unhelpfulness at the same time. It was very confusing.
The girl serving me was increasingly frustrated with my lack of knowledge. I had no real qualms about revealing my ignorance. I wish I had said something like: I can fix up my bike decently well, but I have no idea what you're talking about. She got frustrated and wanted to either do no work or lots of work, but none of this minor tweaking business.
Note: Bike paths often have forks. They often meet up about a hundred yards later. It is often a choice between a high road and low road, or maybe one route provides access to a particular exit off the bikepath. If the two paths will not rejoin, there is usually a sign to indicate which path goes where, or something to that effect.
We came to fork not long after the bike shop. We had just done a mini-sprint that seemed necessary to those who were worried about time in ways that I don't quite understand with distance biking. It must be psychological. The feeling of getting some speed in to make up for the long stop at the bike shop.
11am has come and gone and we are at a fork in the road. A quick decision was made that the left path made more sense. Hopefully there wouldn't be dire consequences. We were supposed to be going North, but we were going Northwest.
Skip a bunch.
There's a canoe floating anchored in a pond and a redwinged blackbird attacks Tyler.
We're lost. This park is not right. We are so far from where we should be. How far out of the way are we? It's hard to say. Let the record show that iPads are bad navigational devices. Well, maybe with the 3G it would work, but using an HTC Evo as a wi-fi hotspot is pointless. Why not just use the GPS on the Evo? Don't worry about it.
Moving North to find a road that connects back the way we want to go.
Oh dear. This is distinctly a full highway with cars going 60-65mph. No fun. No options. We walked along the edge for about 20 minutes to a half hour.
Taking other roads and stop for lunch at about 2:30 before we're even back on the trail. Someone tells me that we have between 60 and 65 miles left. Also, we've probably already gone about the same distance. So, yay, we're sort of halfway, except we made the journey 20% longer and we're not halfway to Milwaukee, we're just halfway if we don't get lost again.
After lunch.
Then it started getting bad for me. The trail. The blasted trail.
There was a heavy mist. Over the next few hours it would build up until my helmet would drip about once every couple seconds. The wind was in our faces. Yay headwind. The trail was wet. The trail was gravel, but not heavy gravel. My Lotus Special 1983 roadbike would not have liked that much, but legs didn't like this fake gravel much either. It was a mixture of very fine gravel and basic sand. The mixture not completely soft, but the water loosened it up for me. After about 5 miles of that straight trail in gloomy mists around Kenosha WI, I could feel that my legs wouldn't take much more. There was no chance of a second wind of energy. The trail was killing me. My tires sunk just a little bit, causing me to lower my gear as if I was going uphill for those 20 or so miles. I was probably biking at about 8mph.
It was brutal. Just brutal.
At one point my bike slipped in a muddy puddle and the wind picked up so that it was especially hard for me to muster the strength to keep my legs moving. The clif bars didn't have the umph to make my legs win at biking into a headwind in bad weather on a soft wet trail after getting lost. I yelled in frustration, "Agh! I can't handle it...! The wind and-" with nothing to add. I was quiet for a while.
Nothing left.
Gone. Done. That's it.
We had already lost three of nine. Three went to the train and took it back to Chicago. Their adventure was cut short, but somehow I kept pushing my legs.
But my frustration turning to anger gave me the little bit of energy I needed for a couple miles until we got to paved road. With under forty miles to go. I slowly started to feel like the end was in sight. It felt ridiculous, but if I didn't have to bike on that trail, I would probably be fine.
I had some extra energy on the better surfaces, but we ended up on some gravel trail again for about 5 miles. With thirty miles left, I felt very hopeful. I started to feel better and better emotionally, but my knees were wearing down and my wrists and fingers were stiffening. The mist intensified and darkness began to fall.
We did eventually make it to Milwaukee, the six of us, at 10pm. We stopped short of downtown (our planned destination) for pizza. Erica, a Notre Dame friend, picked Tyler and I up and we stayed at her parents' house.
Knowing that we had finished felt wonderful, but the physical pain stopped me from feel overly confident about the return.
Sunday, after a day of relative rest and a big meal on Saturday night.
Sunday, back to Chicago.
Sunday, please be kind to me.
Sunday, we set off at 7:40am. Erica kindly dropped Tyler and I off back at the same pizza place that we had ended and we met Derrick there. The three of us traveled together on the way back.
With wonderful weather, no flat tires, better attitudes, better conditioning, a 5-10mph tailwind and dry trails, we thoroughly enjoyed our ride back. We didn't get lost and we hardly had to make any stops. A stop at subway for early lunch and home depot for a hex-wrench. Clif bars and water took us all the way back to Chicago.
Our two mishaps were both related to somewhat playful biking. Tyler and Derrick decided to switch one hand each for the other's handlebars and biked for about 50ft before they weaved, slowed, and tumbled harmlessly (although I was very worried at the time). Also, there was some leg sunburn.
As we entered Chicago, there were two interweaving and parallel paths. As I saw Tyler on the other path and mine looked to be ending, I took off across the grass to join Tyler, but I didn't see a big dip in the grass and hit it pretty hard. I felt my shoulder half-dislocate and then pop back in. Now, I'm double-jointed and I know what it feels like to have my should joint move around in unusual ways. This was not the same. It hurt a lot and continued to be sore for a couple days. It's pretty much okay now, in case anyone was worried about me.
So, after a mostly harmless and generally funtimes day of bikeriding, we arrived back at our startpoint at 6pm on the dot.


Thanks to Tyler for staying back with me when I was struggling.
Thanks to Derrick for being steady and safe, but also for his excellent navigation skills (along with Jake). Android phones... yessss.
Thanks to Jordan for organizing the whole thing, I'm sorry you didn't make it to the end. Next time.
Thanks to Erica for letting Tyler and I stay with you and your parents.
Thanks to Derrick's hosts Molly and Dru.
Thanks to Alan and Beth for buying my a backpack two years ago that is kind of light and outdoorsy. It was perfect for this particular adventure.
Thanks to Ellen for not being mad at me for being kind of out of contact for most of the weekend.
Sorry if I'm forgetting people.
Thanks to

Kiwi for Thought

I recently decided that buying kiwi as a snack item instead of cookies would be a good idea. There are lots of reasons, but one of them is because it (like fruit in general) is supposed to be better for your brain than cookies. I encourage you to be skeptical of these conclusions because, if for no other reason, you will get to keep eating more cookies.

I've discovered that kiwis are one of the more difficult fruits to judge for ripeness. If it's soft, you know it's ripe, but it might be too ripe. If it's still tough... who knows? My squeezy test is not serving me well. A week ago I had a kiwi that was messy. Well, they're all messy, but this one was too ripe and was thus inordinately and probably maliciously messy. I wish to avoid this in the future.

Today, I tried a much tougher kiwi and carved it for a while until I finally realized it was just too tough to eat and enjoy. This saddened me.

Kiwi,

Why do you have to be so difficult? Can't we get along?

Sincerely,

Garrett

How to make your blog worse

I've heard from several people recently that the worst thing you could do to your blog is start to quote other blogs. I think it has something to do with gaining a following of readers who respect you. For every reason you could possibly imagine, I am not worried about any of that.


Thus, I have this to share with you:


"If I meet someone and I try to guess their name before they tell me what it is and it turns out that their name starts with the same letter as the name I guessed - I win.  Then, if I space out because I am thinking about how much I won and I suddenly realize that I have no idea what the other person is talking about and that they just finished a sentence and their voice kind of went up at the end which means that they asked me a question and now they expect me to answer and I say "yes" because I figure that is a pretty common answer and the person doesn't notice that I wasn't listening because "yes" was the answer they were looking for - I win."
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2009/10/i-am-champion.html


In case you were wondering, I am posting all of this because I'm considering the possibility of making my blog slightly worse. For example, the part at the beginning about how people have told me that you shouldn't quote other blogs. Yes, that was a lie. I assume everyone is okay with that now that I'm coming clean on said lie. Also, it's the type of thing that lots of people would say to me if conversations about blog etiquette were a more common part of my life.


Also, the second part of the quote is very true of me. I don't tend to guess names as I meet new people, but I do get pretty excited when I get distracted and get away with it. Again, to make everyone who knows me feel better about this consistently deceptive behavior, it should be pointed out that I am different from the above blogger in that, as my concentration returns, I expend a decent amount of energy on reconstructing what the person just said/is now talking about. A mixture of contextual inference and desperate grabs at fleeting morsels of unconscious memory.


In essence, I'm saying, "Sorry, please don't be mad at me. I try really really hard, I promise."


If you were thinking that last part was kind of pathetic, I can't blame you. Although, you might want to hold your sympathy as you ponder the motives of my sympathy. What do I have to gain from apologizing? Not much. If it was nothing, you could trust me, but I'm clearly looking for sympathy. So, you should stop being sympathetic... right?


Quickly now, go re-evaluate your assumptions about honest human interaction.

Skykus

Flying airtran from Denver to Atlanta, I discovered that all airtran flights have wi-fi, which is great, but not free. You can, however, get free access to twitter through some special thing. Anyway, I posted a few comments on that flight, but on the way from Atlanta to Chicago. I decided the moment called for something more... interesting? Anyway, I wrote a series of haikus through twitter to the world below. So, I give to you "The Twitter Haiku Sequence from 30,000 feet" ...or umm, "Seven Skykus!"

1.

thirty thousand feet

Airtran, what could beat two seats?

one not-broken seat

2.

a long novel begs

but my attention is short

and twitter is #

3.

i'm higher than clouds.

sounds illegal but isn't.

jurisdiction stuff.

4.

what is cooler than

thirty thousand foot haikus?

refrigerators

5.

ode to a brown shirt

not this one, the other, says:

“refrigerator”

6.

just an hour in

and my haiku jokes all end:

refrigerator

7.

battery dying

signing off and thinking “land”

while descent begins

For those that are interested, the landing was one of the worst I've experienced. I hate being a couple hundred feet off the ground for a little too long. It always makes me think something is going on. Looking out the window I keep thinking, we're very close to the ground and non of this looks airport-y. Also, planes should not bank shortly before landing. I think rudders were created for that.

Obama and [p/c]en[ce/ts]

A few weeks ago, I was talking about a class I took right before graduating college. It was called “The American Autobiography” and, for some reason, the name of one of the texts had slipped my mind. Franklin’s autobiography, a slave narrative, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and what? The text I had forgotten was Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father. It was probably because I didn’t finish it. I remember getting up to his college years and losing some of my interest, but other things in my life distracted me and I graduated, returning the borrowed copy to a friend. Now, this really has nothing to do with Barack Obama, but the point when I lost some interest remains important to me. I started to care a little bit less when he got to college because, suddenly, the book wasn’t about me anymore.

Assuming a myriad of perspectives on that last comment, I could guess that it could be interpreted by one person as a comment on literature: that we always relate ourselves most strongly to the child or adolescent character. The twentieth-century canon supports that observation with success of The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. Someone else might claim that to relate your own childhood to the childhood account of a US president is the most arrogant reading you could ever unconsciously produce. That may or may not be true. I can’t imagine it would be a compelling book if readers were unable to relate to Obama’s childhood to their own.

The narrative of his childhood and adolescence has a particular resonance for people who lived away from their "home country" as kids. At the heart of his narrated self is an individual who is pervasively aware of otherness. Thinking about that, I realized that a large part of why I like him is because he understands more about difference and commonality than most people. When the generalized public is referred to as "folks" in just about every clip of presidential speechifying, I feel betrayed because the sensitivity to otherness appears to be contradicted by a unifying rhetorical move that reeks of purely political motives. However, if I give politics the benefit of the doubt for a moment, talking about the “folk” doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The unifying power of that rhetoric doesn't necessitate a homogeneous society, nor does it have to deny the rich diversity that Obama has celebrated.

I don’t really have a final point, but I’m wondering if maybe individualism and collectivism are not separable ideas. That sounds very collectivist doesn’t it?

2-6 day project

Before classes started, there were a few things I wanted to do with my apartment. The TV was sitting on a part of a shoe-rack (pictured below and fake workbench) and it was partially obstructed by wire-shelving that just didn't look right. Anyway, I found a cheap TV stand that helped me make the space work, but I couldn't find any shelves that I liked. Classes were going to start on Tuesday and, last Friday, I decided I didn't like the various shelves at thrift stores, etc. So, with some vaguely remembered wood-working experience, I decided building a bookshelf would be a good project to take on for a couple days before I buried myself in books for the semester. I was glad at the chance to build something with my hands and design the shelves however I wanted. I also really thought it would only take 2 days, maybe 3.

So, after mentally planning the design as I looked at the Home Depot 2x4's, I bought 8 lengths of 2x4 (each 8ft long) and some MDF board as backing. Next, I decided to buy a handsaw: cheaper and less messy than a power-saw, but a poor choice.

This is my project at 3pm on Friday:

(Where else does one complete a messy project in an apartment than the kitchen? Plastic floors are easy to clean.)
You can already see some progress in the background, but the handsaw made for slow work. My handsaw skills were also less accurate then I would have liked, but I kept going (with extremely frequent breaks due to arm pain) and, after 62 cuts, I finished all the sawing at 6pm on Saturday:

...and began the next stage of construction:

Work was interrupted on Sunday by water seeping into my apartment. Tons of thawing snow that have formed 20ft icicles can be problematic. I had pots out to catch the water and my blinds fell out of the waterlogged drywall.
Returning to work late on Sunday and continuing through Monday, I used about 120 wood screws and had to think of some pretty ingenious ways of using the blue clamps to hold it all still while I drilled away. Eventually, I finished the frame and put the MDF backing on at 7pm on Monday:

 The shelves were finally finished! ...sort of:

[just under 4ft tall]
With some stain/varnish combo that took about 5 hours to apply (because of all the little cracks and weird problems of using basic 2x4's to make furniture), I completed my project and am much happier with my living space. Technically, with the stain/varnish, I didn't finish the project until late on Wednesday night (after classes started), but I'm still happy with it.

Living in South Bend, Pt 1

I suppose "Living in South Bend" could be the name of my blog if I was more inclined to regularly document my life instead of posting random musings, which have become increasingly literary. I don't post as much as I could because of a difficulty finding a balance between total literary permeation and the endless daily documentation of mundane events. So, here's a stab at letting people know what's actually going on with me.

Recently, another main reason for very few posts has been a busy schedule. From the end of August until about 6:30pm on Friday, December 17th, I had an increasingly busy schedule in a way I have never known until now. It's easy to say "I never knew what being busy really meant until..." but now I have a new frame of reference. Throughout college, I tried to juggle one or two jobs, classes, reading, and papers with other involvements and personal life, but now I have a personal life and a work life. The line between them is supposed to blur. When should I not be working toward my PhD? So far, my only good answer to that is "only when I just finished final papers," to permit for sanity.

I could talk a lot more about how my classes went last semester, and maybe I will, but right now I'm thinking about the snow outside. If you didn't know, I love snow, especially fresh or falling snow. One winter in Chicago, snow fell every 4 out of every 7 days. I loved it because the snow didn't get a chance to sit around and turn grey, then black. I've been told that we had unusually consistent snowfall so far this year in South Bend. Usually, people say, it snows often, but not for long periods of time. Sounds good to me, fresh snow all the time. On city-data.com it says that South Bend is ranked 18th on the list of 101 US cities with the most snowfall. There were no cities from Illinois on the list. I had to get used to driving, but then I had to get used to driving in the snow. It's sort of exhilarating and another reason why I'm enjoying all the snow. If I had named the blog centimes2pence2cents, I might make a tri-continent comparison of my life in terms of exposure to snow.