concocted glimpse

I started my official training program for the 12k I want to race in December. I have three different runs a week. The first one is “Short Run with Interval Training”. It sounds like a house special. “Pea Soup with Corn Bread.” “Seared Halibut with Red Potatoes.” I’m doing fartlek instead of doing typical intervals or tempo runs. Instead of running designated distances, times, or paces, fartlek is crazy and free. You keep your eye out for landmarks, and whenever you feel like it, you go for it: from this lamp post to that moss covered rock, as fast as an ostrich. From that frond to that oak, mad dash fast.

Today I saw two crows on the thin trail ahead of me, one yards far in front of the other. I noted carefully where they hunched, a gunsman at the starting line, a referee at the finish, and—on your mark, get set—we all spread our wings.

I can vacuum our entire house using only two different outlets. Vacuuming normally doesn’t take very long. But yesterday, after vacuuming one room, my vacuum started smoking—smoking! I flipped it over and started troubleshooting. I was motivated. I wanted to vacuum the house. I wanted to do it right then. [That is how life usually goes. Whatever I'm doing at any given moment is what I want to be doing most at that moment.]

Well, I spent hours—HOURS!—servicing my vacuum. I started motivated and mild. After four failed fixes I was mad [both the "getting" and the "going" sort]. My motivation maintained a high pitch, but my frustration peaked, and I had to start focusing on keeping my frustration lower than my motivation. I was going to run away and live in a cave if I could not vacuum the house. [That is not how life usually goes.]

I eventually worked it into working. Here is my recipe for success:

• 50 parts wanting to be able to fix my own vacuum, so I don’t go out and buy a new vacuum every few years because no one has the parts for/no one maintained the old one
• 50 parts previous cleaning and maintenance: I was already familiar with half of its guts
• 50 parts Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• 30 parts organization: knowing right where to look for things I needed
  • 15 parts files: owner’s manual
  • 10 parts tools
  • 5 parts vacuum parts
• 20 parts foresight: having extra parts on hand because I anticipated maintenance when I bought the vacuum
• 15 parts owner’s manual itself
• 3 parts saltily cussing out the vacuum [HOOVER DAMN!]

Two actual vacuum parts, two hundred and some odd motivation parts, and one maintenance cleaning later I was vanquishing dirt and yodeling with victory.

Yesterday I did three things I have never done before. I adjusted the air in my car tires, I ran four miles, and I ate a jalepeño pepper.

The family McB came to visit!

^ Tazendra, our four year old niece. This photo was taken before she ventured from the house that day; if she had been outside already she would have picked a flower to put in her hair.

Taz gave me a dainty, cordial hug right when she walked in the door. I think perhaps what Taz liked best about Seattle was going out somewhere every day. She and I have this love in common; even a walk to the market is a happy trip. At the EMP|SFM Jim Henson/Muppet exhibit she was hopping with excitement for her turn at the puppet performance stage. Between outings, Taz took a shine to Super Monkey Ball on the Wii and read herself Little Bear and Frances books.

^ Jorge, our mood-machine nephew, here experiencing “Tranquility at Sea”, prefacing “Running Wildly About the Poop Deck” and “Tantrum Ahoy”

Jorge threw himself into my arms when he arrived and repeatedly thereafter too. He melted my heart with all of his affectionate cuddling. He’s pragmatically precocious and he’s ebullient—bubbly joy, bubbly boiling fury, bubbly bursting sorrowful indignity. Within an hour of his arrival he had tried out all my purses and adopted a stuffed penguin that Uncle Roscivs surreptitiously planted in his path, “for he only likes what he finds for himself”. He discovered a fondness for miso soup—when we went out for sushi everyone had something delish to relish with gusto and gusto with relish!

Book 1

I just finished Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. It was a good read. I felt that at least half of it was how we should approach weird beliefs and the people who hold them. The author, Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptics Society, hasn’t always been a skeptic, and I like that. I think this helped him follow Spinoza’s dictum:

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

The book’s ideas seemed like an exercise in balance to me. A balance between skeptical rejection and belief, engaging weird ideas and disengaging, deconstructing an idea and putting forth an alternative.

Book 2

A while ago I read Made to Stick. It felt a bit too much like a plug: hire us to help you market and advertise! Some of the ideas were good [e.g., experts sometimes lose lay audiences because they get caught up in useless accuracy], but they weren’t innovative. The authors protest a bit too much that they’re always on the right side of the line between ‘benign information gimmick’ and ‘sleazy information manipulation’. I am a stickler for informational integrity, and I draw my line in a different spot.

For me the book has two prongs:

(i) how to be memorably creative

(ii) so some ideas stick—so what?

but there are much better explorations of those ideas. For the latter point, I really prefer to answer the “so what?” with “so let’s try to understand more about how we think”, not “so let’s try to make ideas that $ell”.

Book 3

A great book for that is How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Reason in Everyday Life. It deals with cognitive bias and how completely unfounded ideas can be sticky [memorable and compelling] and how we can be aware of our sticky susceptibilities. How We Know What Isn’t So dovetails with Why People Believe Weird Things. Where Why seemed mostly like a book for the weird stuff other people believe, with How I remember thinking a lot about weird stuff I believe.

An artistic pairing, book and song:

• Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
• “Soft Rains” by the 3Ds on The Poetry Album (adapted from the Sara Teasdale poem)

Roscivs and I just finished reading Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It was euphoniously, euphoriously resonant. Roscivs read it to me during car rides, however few or far between. Driving becomes a more novel enterprise for our family every year. Finishing it took us a couple months of ice rink trips and one long drive to a cottage nestled near the rainforests in the Olympic Peninsula.

Something occurred to me in one of the last evenings, during a particular passage, and it seemed improbable to me that I had never really seen it before. Adams was—he had to have been, I was suddenly sure—an environmentalist. One with a radical, heartsick bent, daring anyone to find it even remotely funny. I felt the way one might feel when finally realizing that soy sauce and soy milk are made from the same bean. Of course! A retrospective blink at any single book of the Hitchhiker’s Guide series seems like enough to make it clear. All the Earth destruction!? The teeming life forms across the universe!? All the bizarre biospheres!? The complete non-eminence of humans!? All the pining for the fjords!?!?

Why does it sometimes take so long to recognize a kindred spirit?

This weekend I’m going to a play. My boss is a playwright, and for this play, he’s *the* playwright [ah!, the heady heft of a definite article]. He’d love it if he could be a playwright without being my boss, but even though he doesn’t like his job, I love mine, and he is one of the reasons why. Another reason’s the quarterly party meeting where we close up the Loft [so we don't disturb the rest of the library], talk pedagogy, and then get paid to eat each other’s food and listen to each other’s work—each other’s art.

So I’ve heard pieces of his stuff; my co-workers reading it off the cuff; an act here, a vignette there. But this will be the first one I’ve seen staged. I’m excited!

When Roscivs and I were at BYU together, we went to a lot of Ice Cats games. The Ice Cats aren’t actually a BYU team, because BYU won’t officially recognize them. I discovered their existence when one of my roommates had free tickets she didn’t want. I asked Civs to go, and it became a tradition marked by lots of hoodie wearing, pretzel eating, and cheering. They were Our Team. Since then, though, we’ve had a lack of local hockey.

We have our NHL druthers, but the games are a bit far away. Last month though, thanks to Leon, we had tickets to the last Flames vs. Canucks matchup of the regular season. It was a pivotal Northwest Division game. Unfortunately, I had to endure a crushing defeat. Fortunately, we stayed in a luscious Vancouver hotel room sporting an emperor sized bed with exquisitely soft, dulcet sheets. I checked the tag, and it said [once in English, once en Français]

800 billion count / 100% cloud cotton plucked from the sky above Ireland / made by free range elves in New Zealand / hand wash in unicorn tears, gentle cycle

Those Canadian importers know what they’re doing. Those sheets are probably the only sheets in the world that can soothe the crumpled feelings of a losing fan.

After the big Vancouver game, I could say I’d seen my favorite hockey players on the ice; #34 and #12 of the Flames, and #33 of the Canucks. The jersey numbers were really handy for picking out the players from our seats in the arena; following a game in person is pretty different than it is on TV.

I mention all this because I’ve added a new favorite player, and the team’s local! Roscivs finished his hockey class and he is now an official player on an official team in an official division in an official league. How’s that for a matroska of officiality! All he needs now is an official jersey. The team jerseys haven’t come in yet. I am waiting to find out what number he ordered until I can see it on his back on the ice. Luckily, I don’t need to know his number to spot him.

I would recognize him anywhere.

Last month Roscivs won first place in his division at the Go tournament at the Cherry Blossom Festival. Go is a beautiful game, and to play it well, you must make your soul beautiful.

Last week I read The Elegance of the Hedgehog. It is beautiful, beautiful to tears, and is my new favorite book. It isn’t about Go, it is about life and death, but Go is about life and death, and one of the narrators [a disconsolate, manga-reading, Parisian child who, at the outset of the book, decides she will commit suicide] mentions Go.

When I think of Go… Any game where the goal is to build territory has to be beautiful. There may be phases of combat, but they are only the means to an end, to allow your territory to survive. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the game is that it has been proven that in order to win, you must live, but you must also allow the other player to live.

On Wednesdays, the Seattle Go association meets at Uwajimaya. There’s a very good player and teacher who usually attends—Frank-sensei. He has played two teaching games with me. When he saw how I was playing, he told me what he tells all new Go players. “Build your house. Don’t worry about my house. Build your house.”

Players who are too greedy will lose: it is a subtle game of equilibrium, where you have to get ahead without crushing the other player. In the end, life and death are only the consequences of how well or how poorly you have made your construction. This is what one of Taniguchi’s characters says: you live, you die, these are consequences. It’s a proverb for playing Go, and for life.

Live, or die: mere consequences of what you have built. What matters is building well. So here we are, I’ve assigned myself a new obligation. I’m going to stop undoing, deconstructing, I’m going to start building. Even with Colombe I’ll try to do something positive. What matters is what you are doing when you die, and when June 16th comes around, I want to be building.

I want to be building.

We live on a hill. The city’s drilling through our hill to finish the light rail project. This is right by our house, but the underground drilling has generated as much noise as an earthworm. Maybe as much noise as a singing earthworm. Maybe as much noise as an earthworm who plays the drums in a band with a vole. I can’t say for sure—we’ve never heard any of these things. The city’s dwarving has never bothered us. Until now.

During the drilling, they accidentally hit pockets of sandy sedimentary layers. Prior to the drill, they gathered basic geological data on the drilling areas, so they knew approximately where the layers were, but found it impossible to avoid them. The sand leaked into their tunnel, and they cleared it … but they didn’t mention this to anyone until people started finding holes. One lady found a gaping void visible from the surface. They have reported several additional voids since then. The city thinks that there might be one under our house, so they’re digging up our front yard to see. They’re also accidentally breaking our water pipes. This is very bothersome indeed.

We may come back from our vacation this weekend to find that our house has fallen through to the other end of the earth. Our house is the cherry on top of a geographical parfait, and someone has destabilized the chocolate mousse.