Category: General

It’s been a rough week at work. So busy, so stressful. Today went by fast, but not without its own level of stress.

So I was looking forward to my run tonight. I didn’t care if it was raining. I didn’t care if it was cold. I didn’t care if it was dark.

I was going to run 5 miles no matter what.

Sure, at the beginning, as I was just warming up, and getting used to avoiding puddles, and starting to feel the wind in my lungs, the voice in the back of my head started trying to negotiate a shorter run. It reminded me of my planned 9 mile run this Sunday, and warned that I might be overdoing it tonight.

I shot back with the fact that my two-week average from last week to this week would still only be 16 miles per week, well within my abilities.

It tried to tell me that I could run a shorter distance faster, be out of the rain and cold, and burn more calories.

I countered by pointing out that longer, slower runs burn more calories than short fast ones.

At the decision point, where I have to turn one way to run my 3 mile loop, or another way to run my 4 mile loop, or continue onto my 5 mile loop… I made the right choice. Actually, thinking back, I think that decision was made just after one mile, as I was powering up the long hill in Sellwood Park, and feeling great.

Running my 5 mile loop backwards, though, is a little harder because I don’t do it very often, and the turning point isn’t obvious the way it is when I run it the other direction. So I actually ran farther than I planned.

But the rain actually kept me from overheating. I dressed appropriately (long-sleeved shirt to keep my upper body warm, shorts to keep my legs nice and cool, gloves and a hat for my extremities, and goofy reflective gear and lights for visibility). And after I stepped in the first puddle, I didn’t even notice that my feet were soaking wet.

I just kept running. In the rain.

Courtesy of John Scalzi and YouTube and a bunch of people in a tiny room with pineapple and cookies… a funny/sad version of a song I never really liked, but now, I kinda do.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ6jiZDvX0g&rel=1&border=0]

Too good to wait for Saturday’s “Did you see..?” post.

OK, looks like Apple has put out the first patch for Leopard.

I think I’ll wait for 10.5.2 before I buy it.

Really? Three days since my my last post? My apologies. I don’t normally like to go that long without posting something.

Not much happening lately. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve kinda-sorta given up on this year’s NaNo. Yeah. I’m disappointed, too. It was going so well… for about five or six days. Then… nuttin’. The idea is still good.

I feel a little bad for an encounter at the bus stop a couple of days ago. I was at SE 17th and Bybee waiting for the bus. I had one small bag of groceries sitting on the bench next to me. It was after dark.

Suddenly, wham! a big, unshaven, smelly guy slammed his giant duffel bag down on the bench right next to my groceries. The bag was almost as tall as I was, and it made a hard sound, like there was something solid inside the bag.

My first thought was that the bag would fall over onto my groceries, and I snatched up my own small bag and turned my back to the stranger who had just appeared as if out of nowhere.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said in a loud oddly-pitched voice, “I didn’t mean ta skeer ya.”

I looked back over my shoulder. He was round in every dimension, covered in mis-matched camouflage colors, a little desert brown here, a little forest green there. He smelled like waste, an earthy primal smell. I didn’t look long, just turned back around to look in the direction the bus would come. Seven more minutes, if Tri-Met’s phone service was to be believed.

“Kin ya see the bus?” he asked.

“No.” I said it loudly, too loud for me, but matching his loud voice.

“Kin ya see the bus?” he asked again.

Apparently not loud enough. “No!” It felt like I shouted it.

He walked away, around some tall bushes, in the shadows away from the light over the bus stop. A couple of seconds later, a thin trickle of liquid ran out down the sidewalk from behind the trees and into the street. Then he emerged again, pulling at his pants zipper. He walked back to the bench, muttering “when ya gotta go,” under his breath as if in explanation for his public pissing. Was he justifying himself to me?

I ignored him and just stared down the street, willing the bus to come. I’m not normally outgoing in the best of circumstances, and today I’d been feeling even less social than normal. I really did not want to deal with someone like this guy, who apparently had much lower social boundaries than the general population.

He asked me again if I could see the bus, and I answered again in the negative. Then he said, “Oh, I’m sorry” except it sounded more like surree “I didn’t mean ta skeer ya. I was just makin’ conversation.”

I turned around to face him. Between his smell, his appearance, his strange voice, his nearly flattening my groceries, his choice of place for urination, and his propensity to stand behind me and talk loudly at me, I was honestly feeling more than a little creeped out. I admit seeing things through my own filters and feelings of leave me alone. I just said, “Huh? What? Sorry?” in a loud angry (to me) voice.

“Oh. Oh, OK. I was just makin’ conversation.” he mumbled.

Not today, pal. I struggled internally to just see him as another human being, equally deserving of some empathy. I thought, though, that ignoring him was better than snapping at him or getting angry. I’m still not sure that was the best mindset to have, though.

Just get here, bus, was all I could think.

Is 8 AM late enough to be considered “sleeping in”?

So many dead and wounded.

I wish the veterans, all veterans, my deepest thanks for their service and sacrifice.

I just had a beautiful young woman holding and touching my hands, standing very close to me, speaking softly in an unidentified (to me) accent…

…as part of a sales pitch. She was selling some skin care products from a kiosk in the mall.

She talked about exfoliation, and dry skin, and showed me the difference between my right hand, which had been treated with her lotion, and my left hand, which had not.

I recognized the sales pitch, and felt a brief pang of guilt at wasting her time. Yet I allowed it to unfold just because I feel, still feel, skin-hunger, a desire for simple human touch.

Upon reflection I know that there is only a little difference from the sales transaction that I was a part of (but ultimately declined) and the transaction that takes place in a strip club. She did not choose me out of the crowd because I’m smart, or sexy, or successful, or for my talent of writing. She chose me to offer me a trade: my money for her little blue bottles from Israel, “near the Dead Sea,” she claimed.

I draw a link between that short social intercourse at the mall and my sojourns into Devil’s Point and sharing time with Stormy… and, too, I see a parallel with the spam that fills my inbox, whose subject lines speak of visceral desires and physical needs in the hope of making a sale.

And it saddens me.

It saddens me not simply because I’m subject to the come-on, the come-hither, the c’mere. It saddens me because I seek it out. I don’t simply tolerate it – I’ve convinced myself that it’s my only recourse.

I want to be magnetic. I want to be attractive. I want to be needed.

I am, however, only pliable. I am merely gullible. I find myself needy.

At some point during any furniture move, someone will say, “Wait a minute, let’s stop and think about this.”

That point is often too late.

• This edition of geek webcomic “XKCD” made me laugh. Be sure to mouse-over and read the ALT tag.
• This column by Cary Tennis made me cry. (Just click through the ad; it’s worth it. Cary is always worth it. He’s a genius.) I apologize in advance for the lengthy quote but I didn’t know where to cut without ruining the meaning:
  

  …We go through pretending to be grown-up and untouched but we are just silly kids hoping for the ice-cream truck. It comes every day for a whole month in the summer and then one day it stops. What the fuck?

  I’m no doctor and I’m no genius but the way I figure it when you’re upset you have to know what’s underneath it. If you don’t know, then you’re crying on the bus for no reason and people are staring. But if you know what’s under there, then you recognize that quivering tune when it starts to play. You say to yourself, Oh, yeah, I’m the one with the crazy attachments. I’m the one who gets attached and doesn’t show it, the one people leave behind because they don’t even know I’m attached.

  And then finally by thinking it through you get to this: I’m the one who has to tell people upfront that I get attached. I’m the one who has to make it clear what’s going on.

  People have no idea what’s going on in there. They don’t know you’re attached. Or maybe they do and — what’s harder to accept — they just don’t really care that much! That’s possible, too. It’s not the end of the world. That’s just how some people are. They’re not even thinking about you. They’re thinking about whether they’re amused or not. They’re thinking about whether there’ll be somebody to have coffee with. It doesn’t matter who. It’s just a person to have coffee with that they need.

  Maybe they’d be pleased to know you get attached if it made them feel super-attractive and important. But maybe they’d feel hemmed in, like now all of a sudden you’re a big, needy responsibility they didn’t want. Or maybe they wouldn’t care either way. Maybe if you were to say that you get attached and feel things deeply and take things hard and that friendship matters greatly to you and you find it hard to understand how other people can just walk away like that, maybe the words wouldn’t even go into their head and activate brain cells. Hard to tell. Some people just flit around and it’s all the same to them: You’re not a person. You’re just people.

  I mean, you’re special to me, and you’re special to your mom, and you’re special to yourself, but you’re not special to everybody. To a lot of people you’re just somebody in the neighborhood. Can you handle not being special? Sure you can! You do it all the time. In 99 percent of our interactions, we’re not special. You pay your money and you get your Fast Pass. Maybe you pay your money every month and see the same gold tooth in the smile. Then one day it’s a new smile. You miss the old smile with the gold tooth, but there’s no formal announcement saying, “I know you were really starting to like seeing that same smile every month but I’m a new person at the counter; sorry for inflicting this tiny change in your life; I, too, wish things could go back the way they were.”

  That will never happen. If it happens even once I want to hear about it.

  Things change all the time. We can’t do anything about it and neither can the police.

  People come, people go, you adjust.

  How do you adjust? You pay attention to your thing. You turn your attention from what is lost to whatever your thing is.

  See? Genius.

• Writer’s Strike. Yay, writers! Yay, union! May not seem like it at times, from my past posts, but I’m generally pro-union for all the reasons Digby says.
  

  You hear a lot of nasty snark in this town about how these WGA strikers are all millionaires playing at being hardhats, and it totally misses the point. The union movement is about solidarity, which is a fundamental progressive value…

  Unions and the solidarity it promotes are an important key to a progressive America, whether it’s the Writers Guild or the UAW or the janitors or the health care workers. They promote a strong and stable middle class — and help us see ourselves as one people with common interests.

  Digby also talks about the literal blood in the streets from back when the entertainment unions were first formed, and how many of the leaders of the original union movement were later blacklisted or accused of being “commies”. The fight today to re-build the labor movement is just as important, after decades of union-busting and internal corruption… even if actual blood isn’t being spilled. Go here for news and to offer your support.

• Did you ever, ever, even in a passing nightmare, imagine that you would live in a country where the Attorney General, the chief law enforcement officer for the shining beacon of human rights and democracy known as the United States of America, would not commit in open testimony prior to his confirmation to torture being wrong? And who would go on to be confirmed, anyway? Surprise! You do live in that country! As Glenn Greenwald says:
  

  The most amazing quote was from chief Mukasey supporter Chuck Schumer, who, before voting for him, said that Mukasey is “wrong on torture — dead wrong.” Marvel at that phrase: “wrong on torture.” Six years ago, there wasn’t even any such thing as being “wrong on torture,” because “torture” wasn’t something we debated. It would have been incoherent to have heard: “Well, he’s dead wrong on torture, but . . . “

  Now, “torture” is not only something we openly debate, but it’s something we do. And the fact that someone is on the wrong side of the “torture debate” doesn’t prevent them from becoming the Attorney General of the United States. It’s just one issue, like any other issue — the capital gains tax, employer mandates for health care, the water bill — and just because someone is “dead wrong” on one little issue (torture) hardly disqualifies them from High Beltway Office.

  Whatcha gonna do about it?

• From my youngest nephew comes The Impossible Quiz. I didn’t do so good on my first time through. Maybe you can do better.
• Apparently, Radiohead threw a party on the web late Thursday! Here’s a video from the stream:
  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3etGst-XSIo&rel=1]

I was going to save this for Saturday’s “Did you see..?” but I just couldn’t hold back.

NYGirlOfMyDreams.

What a lucky bastard.

I keep posting and responding to ads on Craigslist and all I get in return are spam and porn.

Anyway… good for him.